with "Consciousness Raising" meetings. After being invited to one of the meetings by her new landlord, Baca says she began meeting other professional women for the first time in her life. "Women who were doctors, and lawyers, and biologists, and chemists, and I had never met anybody like that. I was like completely amazed at the possibility of what was available for women". Through these she was introduced to feminist art by Judy Chicago and inspired by a few of her works, naming Woman's Space, Woman's Building, and the Feminist Studio Workshop. SPARC Great Wall of Los Angeles Their first project was the Great Wall of Los Angeles. She was hired by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to help improve the area around a San Fernando Valley flood control channel called the Tujunga Wash. It's essentially a ditch that contained a large concrete retaining wall. Her idea for a mural was to paint a history of the city of Los Angeles, but not the version found in history books. The events that were overlooked were the ones that interested her. "It was an excellent place to bring youth of varied ethnic backgrounds from all over the city to work on an alternate view of the history of the U.S. which included people of color who had been left out of American history books." Baca also said the defining metaphor of the mural would be that "It is a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran." Baca was inspired by Los tres Grandes ("The Three Greats"), a novel about three of the most influential Mexican muralists: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. In 1977 she attended a workshop at the Taller Siqueiros in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to learn muralism techniques and see their murals in person. Even though all three were deceased by that time, she was able to work with some of Siqueiros' former students. When she returned and began this project, Baca made the explicit decision to involve people from the community that represented voices that have been historically marginalized. At the beginning of the mural project in 1976, Baca, with funding through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), began work with nine other artists, five historians, and 80 young people who had been referred to the program by the criminal justice department. For Baca, the project was about more than just