From ‘Across the Street’ to Laguna Beach : Art: The museum’s silk-screen acquisitions not only mean exposure for Latino artists, but also represent progress.

Laguna Art Museum curator Bolton Colburn sensed something uniquely vital the moment he entered Self-Help Graphics.

The community-based art center in East Los Angeles, born of the tumultuous Chicano rights movement of the 1960s, was founded to nurture the careers of young Latino artists via workshops, exhibitions and free access to professional silk-screen printing facilities.

When Colburn first visited Self-Help in 1989, most of those who are now Southern California’s leading Latino artists had passed through the organization. While there, they produced riotously colorful, dazzling imagery that expressed an array of cultural influences, from pop art to politics to pre-Columbian iconography.

“It was obviously a center of extraordinary energy and creativity for Los Angeles at the time,” Colburn said. “There was more activity there, and artists were working differently than anywhere else in the city.”

Colburn was so impressed that he urged the Laguna museum to back his enthusiasm and acquire Self-Help’s entire silk-screen output between 1982, when the program began, and 1992, when the deal was sealed. During that period, more than 100 artists created limited-edition prints with master printers hired for the nonprofit center’s well-known silk-screen “Atelier” program.

“It became obvious that it would be really important to acquire this body of work,” for which Laguna paid $17,000, said Colburn, the museum’s curator of collections. “No other institution had it.”

The fruits of the museum’s 170-print, 90-artist acquisition are now on view in “Across the Street: Self-Help Graphics and Chicano Art in Los Angeles.” It contains 70 silk-screens by Gronk, David Botello, Barbara Carrasco, Gilbert Lujan, Diane Gamboa, Frank Romero, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez, Orange County residents Willie Herron and Jose Lozano and others. The exhibit will travel to Los Angeles, Texas and Alaska.

“The Laguna Art Museum’s purchase of this whole collection symbolizes a very meaningful step in the documentation and representation of an art that had not been fully recognized,” Cal State Northridge art history professor Margarita Nieto said in a recent conversation.

Added Self-Help founder and director Karen Boccalero: “It’s greater recognition for all the artists involved.”

Boccalero, an art student and Franciscan nun who grew up in East L.A., founded the print center in a garage in 1971. (It’s now housed in a nearby two-story building.) She hoped to make art widely accessible and broaden opportunities for struggling Chicano artists, who were striving to “express Chicano identity through a language particular to their culture” and to educate and enhance their community, Nieto writes in an essay for the show’s bilingual catalogue.

Most popular at the time were silk-screen prints and outdoor murals. The prints were inexpensive to reproduce and purchase and created via collaboration between artist and master printer. Boccalero soon started silk-screen workshops for “anyone who cared to learn, to come and make art,” Nieto writes.

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In the ‘80s, although the print shop itself had no political affiliation, many of its artists were involved with the Chicano art movement, with United Farm Workers of America or other Latino activist organizations, Colburn said during a recent interview at the museum.

“A lot of (artists) were talking politics, but not that many were executing work that was politically inclined,” he said. “Self-Help was.”

The imagery in “Across the Street” is diverse. In representing the Chicano search for identity, the artists incorporate signs of popular culture, reflections of East L.A. life and expressions of Mexican culture.

The fact that the Self-Help artists were working contrary to prevailing market trends of the go-go ‘80s makes the work even more attractive to a curator in search of fresh terrain, Colburn said.

“They were doing the exact opposite of the rest of L.A.,” he said. “Where everybody was out trying to (sell) their Ed Ruscha prints for $30,000, $40,000, Self-Help Graphics was selling its prints for $100 a pop, and they were really popular. It seemed so ironic and so wonderful at the same time.”

Likewise intriguing, Colburn said, is that “several Chicano artists at Self-Help chose not to define themselves as ‘Chicano artists,’ though there are others who are very proud of being Chicano and pulling from their heritage. So, that’s a tension within the exhibit.”

“This work,” Nieto added in her interview, “obviously comes from a commitment to a community and a specific cultural awareness, but it reflects many of the attitudes and ideas and concepts of the ‘60s and ‘70s in American culture, not just Chicano culture. What this means is that Chicano art is clearly part of that anomaly we call American art history.”