Barbara Carrasco

Carrasco refused to censor her mural because she felt "that it would be compromising the integrity of--not only my integrity as an artist but the mural, the history of L.A." Later, there was a court battle over the copyright of the mural, which Carrasco won. After a decade, Carrasco mural stored away in a storage room has finally been able to be presented to the public once again. The Natural History Museum had announced they were able to obtain Barbara Carrasco mural, "L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective," that is exhibited from March 2018 to August 2019. Now, this mural has a place to stay in the museum so that visitors can experience Los Angeles history through the Carrasco mural.

She is a founding member of the Dolores Huerta Foundation and serves as a board member. Carrasco was a UC Regents Professor in 2002-2003. She was recognized as a "community champion" in Los Angeles in 2014.

One of Carrasco's most iconic images is her print, Dolores (1999). The image depicts a bust of Dolores Huerta on a flat background with just her name. The image has a pop art sensibility to it. Carrasco states that she isolated her portrait in such a way to show that Huerta was "strong enough on her own."

Carrasco received her MFA in art from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1991. After graduating from CalArts, she didn't feel inspired and stopped producing art for about two years. In addition, the death of Cesar Chavez in 1993 created a sense of deep depression in Carrasco: she felt that there were not enough Chicano leaders and that few people could take his place.

Names Can Hurt (1991), was the first piece that Carrasco did which contained text. It was acrylic on canvas and contains many of the names she was called as a child growing up in Culver City.

In the mid 1990s, Carrasco married artist, Harry Gamboa Jr. Gamboa and Carrasco had been good friends first for some time, and Carrasco liked him especially because he was "supportive of women artists." In 1994, she had a daughter, Barbie. In 1995, she was diagnosed with lymphoma and in 1996 had a bone marrow transplant to treat the disease. After the transplant, Carrasco felt that her hand was less steady for detailed work.

In 1989, Carrasco created a computer animation, PESTICIDES!, which was shown in Times Square in New York. It was considered "controversial."

In response to the censorship of the History of Los Angeles: A Mexican Perspective, Carrasco created the serigraph, Self-Portrait (1985) at Self-Help Graphics. Self-Portrait depicts an artist dressed as a runner crossing a finish line. The runner, carrying a paintbrush looks over her shoulder in horror as a paint-roller whitewashes the mural grid behind her. The whitewashing of Siqueiros's controversial mural is referenced again on the brush itself.

One of Carrasco's greatest works is a mural, a 16 by 80 foot, she was commissioned by the community of Redevelopment Agency in 1981 began drafting. The mural was called, "L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective" and she wanted the public to view the perspective from a minority. The city approved of the sketches of the mural, but, when she began the process of painting it, the agency told her to remove 14 images from the work in progress. The images they wanted Carrasco to remove showed incidents of discrimination by communities of color. The mural displayed slavery, America internment camps during World War II, and the zoot suit riots that had attacked Mexican American youth. When they requested her to remove these images, Carrasco refused to do so. But because she had refused them, the project of the mural was canceled. The mural was then put in a storage room for nearly a decade without showing the truth of the discrimination of minorities to the public. There were fifty-one separate events depicted in the mural. Events depicted in this mural include the Japanese American internment, the whitewashing of Siqueiros's mural, América Tropical, and the Zoot Suit Riots. Carrasco worked with three different historians to ensure that her information was accurate and conducted oral interviews with "city elders." To create the mural, she had 17 young assistants, many of them gang members. There were several times that CRA attempted to censor the subject matter in the mural and even attempted to destroy the mural itself.

In the mid-1980s, Carrasco was commissioned to create a mural, The History of Los Angeles: A Mexican Perspective which led to a great deal of controversy. The publicity generated from the controversy, however helped Carrasco in some ways: she was chosen to go with a group of artists to the Soviet Union in 1985 and paint a mural in the Children's Museum in Yerevan, Armenia. She went on a second trip to the Soviet Union the next year and also took Dolores Huerta's thirteen-year-old son, Ricky, with her. She also went to Nicaragua in 1986 with a UCLA program called the Chicano Delegation to Nicaragua. It was during the Nicaraguan Revolution and the experience affected Carrasco deeply, making her think about death in a different context.

During the summers, she and her sisters were part of a program that helped young people from the projects attend classes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Carrasco credits the program with also expanding her horizons and encouraging her to apply for college. Carrasco attended Venice High School. Carrasco received her BFA in art from UCLA in 1978. She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. At UCLA, she was the first woman editor of the campus Chicano newspaper, the La Gente.

Carrasco was just 19 years old when she met Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and decided to work with him. [1] Carrasco was active with the United Farm Workers (UFW), creating banners for them between the years of 1976 and 1991. Carrasco worked closely with Chavez to create flyers and banners for conventions, rallies and supermarket demonstrations for the United Farm Workers. One of the largest banners she created for the UFW was about 30 feet by 30 feet on vinyl with Nazdar ink. Carrasco had about two weeks to complete the work and recruited a few people to help her finish it on time. The last banner she did for UFW was Cesar Chavez's funeral banner.

By protesting within her artwork, Carrasco created a social change for the UFW Union and the Dolores Huerta Foundation. One of her famous works, Dolores, which is a portrait of Cesar Chavez's daughter was to honor her as the co-founder of the UFW Union which she worked alongside for 15 years. In 1970, Carrasco at the time was a student at UCLA and created her artwork, Pregnant woman in a ball of yarn. She was inspired to create this piece after hearing her brother telling his pregnant wife she was unable to go to school because she was pregnant. Chavez would see the process of her artwork come to life. He had attended one of Carrasco’s press conferences that viewed her artwork, Pesticides, in New York in 1989 which her work was shown in Times Square. Carrasco’s work has been shown in many exhibits such as in the US, Europe, and in Latin America. Some of her original mural sketches and drawings are now housed in the Permanent Collection at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and have been archived at Stanford University Special Collections Mexican American Manuscript Collections. Carrasco herself has stated that because she was so political, her art hasn't been taken as seriously. Carrasco credits older Chicana artists, like Santa Barraza, with creating a "positive impact" on her work. She also enjoyed working with other Chicana artists in her generation, like her friend Yreina Cervantez. Carrasco's work often uses "fine lines, sharp detail and a hard-edged graphic quality."

Barbara Carrasco (born 1955) is a Chicana artist and activist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She is considered to be a "radical feminist" whose work critiques dominant cultural stereotypes involving socioeconomics, race, gender and sexuality. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work was exhibited in the 1990-1993 traveling exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation.