‘Self-Help Graphics’ Vibrates With Energy and Intimacy

What really happened in the art world of the ‘80s?

Was it the decade of the art star, of soaring prices, masters and masterpieces? Or was it a period of emerging visibility for artists from a range of cultural backgrounds, a time of renewed social engagement and a return to content?

Yes, and yes.

It was a schizophrenic decade, marked by extremes--the opening of doors and the closing of minds. While some confirmed the art historical canon, others argued for its collapse.

In San Diego this month, two shows represent contrasting voices in this chorus of intentions.

One, “Prints of the Eighties,” at the San Diego Museum of Art through Aug. 26, is a paean to corporate involvement in the arts. A fine but predictable selection of prints from the BankAmerica Corp. Art Collection, the show features familiar names working in by-now-familiar styles. The sole exceptions are a few more adventurous works by younger New York artists.

The second show, “Self-Help Graphics: Selected Works,” opens tonight with a public reception from 6 to 9 at the David Zapf Gallery (2400 Kettner Blvd.) and continues through Sept. 1.

Where the museum show is safe, this show at a commercial gallery is searing. It vibrates with all of the energy, freshness and intimacy that “Prints of the Eighties” lacks. Its artists are primarily young and lesser known. They have all been participants in a community-based program designed to nurture the talents of Chicano artists.

Self-Help Graphics and Art Inc. was founded in 1972 by Sister Karen Boccalero, an artist and Franciscan nun, to promote Chicano art in Los Angeles. The organization operates a gallery in East L.A. called Otra Vez, and has sponsored a mobile art studio that visits schools in the area.

The Screenprint Atelier Program, from which the current show derives, was established by Self-Help Graphics in 1983 to provide artists with the assistance of a master printer, a fully equipped studio and the opportunity to discuss works-in-progress with other artists. As of 1988, 130 prints have been made by 62 artists as part of the program.

More than 25 silk-screen prints are included in the David Zapf Gallery show, and the selection offers much to savor, from the soft spirituality of Ester Hernandez’s “The Cosmic Cruise” to the cultural contradictions of Jean La Marr’s “Some Kind of Buckaroo,” in which an Indian in cowboy dress is shown standing behind barbed wire on a planet of lace.

There are exultations of life--David Botello’s “Long Life to the Creative Force,” most explicitly--and of death. In Vincent Bautista’s “Calaveras in Black Tie,” three well-dressed skeletons shoot comic, disarming stares from their gaping, black eye sockets.

A lush, often scorching intensity of color characterizes nearly all of the prints, as does a spirit of direct engagement, immediacy and overflowing vitality. Indulgences in self-conscious formalism and gratuitous decoration appear only peripherally here, and cerebral gymnastics are equally rare.

Self-scrutiny is a frequent concern among the artists whose works are gathered here. Most, like Diane Gamboa and Patssi Valdez, focus on the face and the private passions it reveals.

In Gamboa’s self-portrait, the artist’s face juts in from the paper’s edge, interrupting a still sea of black with an expression of alarm. Her eyes, locked in the viewer’s direction, stare piercingly from within shadowy circles of blue. Her crimson lips part slightly and her hand rises to her face in seeming disbelief.

Gamboa pictures herself as having a penetrating vision and confrontational stance, qualities that are borne out in her other work, such as the tough, splintered tableau titled “Little Gold Man,” also on view here.

Valdez’s face appears five times, aligned in the shape of a cross, in her self-portrait, “Scattered.” Each time, her visage is torn, sliced, fragmented or exploded, but her mesmerizing stare persists through the chaotic confetti around her.

A third self-portrait, by Margaret Garcia, complements the agitated splendor of those by Gamboa and Valdez. It boasts its own mix of quiet traditionalism and raging color. The same contemplative grace infuses Garcia’s print, “Anna Comiendo Salsa (Anna Eating Salsa).” Here, Garcia defines the shape of a woman, seated and bent over a table, with thick, viscous strokes of gold, turquoise, green, orange and purple. The fluid, luminous result lifts a humble scene into the realm of the transcendent.

The artists in “Self-Help Graphics” were brought together on the basis of their race, but it is the intensity of their visions that binds them at least as much as their common heritage. Cultural chasms, conflicts and conciliations do appear to interest several artists in the show, notably Jesus Perez and Daniel Martinez, but the range of concerns here runs wider and deeper than that.

Chicano art, Sister Boccalero writes in a Self-Help Graphics brochure, is “a rich and vital part of the American heritage.” The organization effectively supports that notion, and exhibitions like this give it the insistent power of truth.