Dr. Jonathan Gross, a featured club speaker for many years, presents his new talk: Censorship in the Great Wall of Los Angeles and La Reina de Los Angeles: Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco and Blake’s “Mental Fight.”  The censorship of art in the New World has been particularly egregious, as William Blake predicted it would be in “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” and “America”. The Andrew Carnegie foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation (and Nelson Rockefeller), for example, funded work by Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, only to withdraw their support, sometimes whitewashing the artwork.

These institutions also played nefarious roles that both support and bury the radical feminist perspectives of Judy Baca and Barbara Carrasco, as Giusela LaTorre notes in Walls of Empowerment. Baca’s mural is in a conveniently inaccessible location  in the San Fernando valley (few natives of California even know of its existence), while Carrasco found her work buried in archives for more than twenty years.  

You must be a club member to attend. Here is a list of club members: CUCC Club Members. If you are not a club member, please join to attend this event: Become a Club Member.

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Time: 6:30PM Central, 7:30PM Eastern, 4:30PM Pacific. For those in Europe the time is 12:30AM in London on Cctober 15.

Location: Zoom Video Conference

Cost: Exclusive for Club Members 

About Dr. Gross

Jonathan Gross is a scholar of English Romanticism. He has edited a number of novels by women writers  from this period (Belmour, The Sylph), as well as Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks and Lady Melbourne’s Letters (Rice  U P, 1997). He is interested in mixed media compilations, including Anne Damer’s sculpture which he explores in his biography of the 18th century artist (2012). He has written three works on Byron (Byron: the Erotic Liberal; European Byron [2025], as well as Byron’s `Corbeau Blanc’: the Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne), and one on graffiti (Words of the Prophets, Brill, 2023). He has served as Humanities Center Director at DePaul  (2007-2012) and as Joint-President of the  International Association of Byron Societies. (2012-2022).

A Note on Barbara Carrasco

“Originally commissioned in 1981 by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency to celebrate the city's bicentennial, the mural contains historical moments in the evolution of Los Angeles — but it was quickly censored. Carrasco was told that she would have to omit 14 different scenes within the mural, including depictions of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, the internment of Japanese American communities and the death of reporter Ruben Salazar during the 1970 National Chicano Moratorium March. These scenes are woven in with other people, events and places that made the city what it is today — with a focus on multicultural contributions”

Photo Credit: Aeon Media, Public Domain