Parking for 10/20 SPARC 35th Celebration Party:
Parking for Honorees & Sponsors: directions available from Parking Attendant in front of SPARC, 685 Venice Blvd, to Lot 613, Pisani Place, Venice
Parking Suggestions for Party Guests:  See Parking Attendant in front of SPARC for directions
Lot at Blur Studio, 589 Venice Blvd (look for Event Parking Signs w/red balloons)
Lot at  Venice Village, 608-654 Venice Blvd (look for Event Parking Signs w/red balloons)
Street parking all around SPARC

Founded in 1976 by Chicana muralist and Distinguished UCLA Professor Judith F. Baca, filmmaker/director Donna Deitch, and artist/teacher Christina Schlesinger.

SPARC was born in a time of change – the 1970s. It has, since its inception, been a catalyst for social change through the arts and a home for artistic innovation. Being a catalyst has often meant handling the many currents that flow through historical events at the moment they are occurring and working outside of typical art venues in the places where people live and work.

Since our founding in 1976, SPARC has taken the work from the blighted streets of skid row, to agricultural fields of Guadalupe, CA, to concrete flood control channels of Los Angeles, to Gorky Park, Moscow. We painted a 1/2-mile of the flood control channel, a scar where the river once ran with murals that 400 at risk youth painted, built parks in debris filled land, hung photographic tapestries in senior citizens centers, and built sculptures for children to play on in vacant lots and produced hundreds of the most iconic murals of Los Angeles. Today we have contemporized our historic mural processes through the incorporation of technology in our UCLA@SPARC Digital/Mural Lab.

“This mural opened my eyes so much. Even when I’m down and out, I still walk by here and I'm thankful I did accomplish something in my life. It makes me feel good. I think if it wasn’t for this mural, for me to have my name on it and to have accomplished something, I don’t know where I’d be.”
- Ernestine, Great Wall of Los Angeles Alumni from 1977-1984