Visual Aid : East L.A. center helps bring artists and neighbors together: ‘Part of the Chicano art movement is to make art accessible.’

Even on a colorful street like Brooklyn Avenue in East L.A., where murals abound and shops festoon their wares in windows, out the doors and onto sidewalks, one building stands out. It’s a two-story mosaic of pottery shards, mirror bits and tile chips that all but obscure the once-drab tan brick facade.

Self-Help Graphics calls itself a community-based visual arts center with a mission to support and develop Latino artists and to promote Chicano culture. Everything about the center--its exhibition gallery and gift shop, printmaking and etching rooms, studios for artists-in-residence--evidences such purposes. Yet, for all the professionalism, the place feels like a neighborhood center.

Take the parking lot in back.

Steel sculptor Michael Amescua, 45, has a shed there, just outside his warren-like studio. Metal scraps are piled high; works-in-progress wait in various stages of completion; dishes of cat food lie underfoot--as do cats-in-residence Tryke and Rolli.

On a scorching afternoon, Amescua is ready for action, surrounded by the cats, his assistant, Edward Lira, and three neighborhood boys.

“This is the crew,” Amescua says. The boys pick up pocket money by doing odd jobs. Informally, they learn.

“Ernesto, get me my mask, the electrodes and the chipping hammer,” Amescua says as he prepares to work on “Fire in the Forest,” a tall, curved work of trees, plants, and alert animals about to flee. “I give them an art vocabulary,” he explains.

Ernesto Lopez, 10, scurries forward with the items. The boys don thick gloves and dutifully close their eyes and hold the sculpture while Amescua welds the base.

“I’ve seen four generations of kids,” says Amescua, who has been involved with Self-Help for 17 years. “The younger kids will come by and work with me until they discover girls. Then they don’t want to get dirty at all. They’ve gotta look sharp.”

He grins and looks toward Lira, who appears to be in his 20s: “They’ll come back when they’re around Ed’s age.”

Up an outside staircase and through a vast second-story hall--which neighborhood people rent for wedding receptions and quinceaneras-- is the director’s office.

Sister Karen Boccalero, a Franciscan nun in sensible shoes, baggy pants and a T-shirt, grew up in the neighborhood, studied art and returned 20 years ago to found Self-Help Graphics and Art Inc. Now 59, she runs the place and serves as artistic director.

This afternoon, she is holding the first meeting of seven artists who will participate in a silk-screen atelier , or workshop, focused on the L.A. riots.

Cigarette in one hand, the other occasionally smoothing her thick gray hair, Boccalero looks alternately harried and delighted as she moves between concepts and techniques--paper size, margins, printing schedule, real and surreal qualities of the riots, and the importance of recording the experience.

Artist Xavier Cortez, a question in his voice, says: “You said not too political. . . .”

Boccalero cuts in: “If I said that I was wrong. I have a lot of trouble with what’s political, what’s not. Chicanos, by the nature of their artwork, are reminding people of who you are.”

Another artist asks if other colors may be used.

“We never talk about that in public,” she answers drolly. She will leave the final decision to printmaker Richard Balboa, she says, but urges them to plan on six colors. Biting her lip, she reminds them that the prints will be limited editions: “This is the painful part of it. Any stencils you make or rejected copies have to be destroyed. All right?”

If Boccalero has one common refrain, it is that Self-Help remain non-competitive and cooperative. She invokes it now in setting the date for the last meeting, when the artists will be given portfolios of each other’s work.

“Everybody will show their work and explain what they’re doing. That’s good because that’s what this is all about. We’re all different,” she says.

“You’re all promising you’re gonna come, aren’t you? You’re all promising each other--you owe it to each other.”

More than 170 artists have participated in Self-Help’s silk-screen workshops, many of which have focused on a theme, such as the Day of the Dead or the United States-Mexico border. Dozens of artists have exhibited their works in the center’s Galeria Otra Vez; almost 100 have completed the etching program; some 37 sell their works on consignment at Colores, the gift shop.

And countless Latinos have made their first visits to an art gallery when they came to Self-Help.

“If we didn’t exist in the heart of the community, they would have no other gallery,” says Tomas Benetiz, administrative assistant. “There’s a core of people who come to all the events. They live down the street. The experience becomes something that’s not foreign.”

And once they become gallery regulars, he adds, they often visit other museums.

Using the center for celebrations and meetings, theatrical productions, poetry readings and lectures adds to the familiarity, Benetiz says: “It’s not a program. We’re not doing social work here. We’re doing cultural work that has social responsibility.”

Sometimes the give-and-take with the community can be light. Benetiz tells of the mosaic facade, the uncompleted work of resident artist Eduardo Oropeza. A dry cleaner across the street has ideas on how it should progress, he says, and high school girls are lobbying for bigger pieces of mirror--the better to adjust their makeup.

Downstairs in the gift shop, which Peter Tovar runs while working on his own crafts and paintings in the back, Boccalero stops before one of Leo Limon’s prints that sells for $350.

(All print editions made here are divided equally between Self-Help and the artist. Self-Help sells its half for between $150-$350 each ; the artists are free to set their own prices for their share.)

She recalls a young man who frequently came to the shop and gazed at the Limon print: “ ‘I’ve been saving money for Leo’s print,’ he told me, and I asked him, ‘How much are you up to?’ He said, ‘I’ve got $100,’ so I told him, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ ”

He got the print.

“It’s part of my philosophy,” Boccalero explains. “I feel part of the Chicano art movement is to make art accessible. That’s why there’s all this public art, like the murals.”

Anticipating some expectations of Chicano art boundaries, she says of Self-Help: “This is not a place where all you’re going to see is cactuses and virgins. It reflects the work of the community as it has developed a body of work over a period of time.”

That work is diverse, embodying whimsy, rage, romance, cars, sex, Aztecs and gangsters. It is not that you won’t see virgins. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a common image and in one piece is tattooed on the back of a cholo . In others it is contained within the facade of City Hall or among items displayed in a painting of a charmed ‘50s-era Chicano kitchen.

The connection between the artists and the community is one that Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commissioner Al Nodel finds crucial.

“The artists have become the communicators in the Chicano community. Artists and politicians are putting out the ideas.” he says. “Artists, especially visual artists, have kept the traditions of the community alive, the symbols.”

Nodel, whose agency helps fund Self-Help, gives it high marks and calls it unique: “I see it almost as a spiritual center for the Chicano art community. It’s definitely a service center. . . . But, they’re real devoted to the artist as a human being, and they give the kind of tender loving care that artists need.”

Nowhere have artists and community come together more strongly than in the parking-lot shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Boccalero, with a wry smile, describes the shrine’s genesis as a “revolt.”

In 1974, when Self-Help moved into the building that formerly housed the Catholic Youth Organization, a gigantic, decrepit statue of the Virgin Mary was found. Not wanting Self-Help to seem Catholic and possibly alienate some artists, Boccalero ordered the statue moved to the parking lot for disposal.

Before she knew it, artists had built an Aztec pyramid for a base, mounted the statue on it and covered the peeling gown and mantle with pink-and-blue mosaic. The neighbors adorned it with Christmas lights, planted succulents around it and placed vases of artificial flowers and candles at its feet.

Not all artists think they have received tender loving care at Self-Help. Boccalero is the first to say that for some, the experience may have been negative. Suggestions that some artists owe their starts, or status, to Self-Help irritate her, as do questions about artists moving on but remaining attached.

Pulling at her hair, she insists that the experience is “not hierarchical. Imagine this as a huge Chicano art movement. Their hard work and talent is at the core. Erase the model of a school that you go through . It’s circular. People move in and out at different times.”

Margaret Garcia has done just that. Formerly a resident artist, the Chicana painter is returning for a project titled “I Feel Like an Envelope--Brown and Unaddressed.” She will ask people in the community to “address the envelope,” describing how they define themselves.

Garcia has had difficulties with Boccalero in the past, she says, both personal and ideological. But in the end, she says, Boccalero “has an agenda, and it’s a good one. Without Self-Help, there would be no place to perpetuate our culture. Otherwise only mass media would define us.

“(And) it’s too dangerous if it’s not in our hands.”