Self-Help Graphics Treats Itself to a Birthday Party

In a town dedicated to instant obsolescence, any outfit that survives a quarter-century is noteworthy. This is particularly true if the subject is a grass-roots, nonprofit art workshop in the East L.A. barrio like Self-Help Graphics.

At the moment the workshop is modestly patting itself on the back with an event called “El Big Two Five.” On one hand, it’s an exhibition of what a scholar would call archival material. On the other, it’s an unpretentious celebratory stew of memorabilia, snapshots, posters, installations, videotapes and an invitation to visit Self-Help on its Web site. It seems a little odd to go on the Internet to find out about a place when you’re already there, but what the heck.

The vintage Spanish Revival building housing the workshop was rendered unmistakable by artist Eduardo Oropeza. He covered much of the exterior with a mosaic of colorful broken crockery that recalls the Watts Towers. He also sculpted an over-life-size figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe that rests benignly in the parking lot.

Entering the building, one first encounters a montage of photographs that lets you know Self-Help is a community affair. There’s Oropeza installing his Virgin. Nearby there’s a shot of a pretty little girl dressed in what looks like a wedding gown. Since she is too young to be a bride, the outfit is seemingly for the Catholic rite of passage known as confirmation. Next to her stands a burly street vendor wearing a yellow hard-hat and hawking his wares. Gallery director Christine Ochoa points out that the corner across the street has been his turf for years. Look out the window and, sure enough, there he is. There’s a winning sense of serene continuity about East L.A. you rarely find west of the river.

The next installation is a shrine dedicated to Self-Help’s founding director Sister Karen Boccalero, who died last year. She incorporated the workshop in 1972, inspired to do something constructive in face of the mounting civil unrest of the period. This was the time when Mexican American artists like Carlos Almaraz joined Chavez’s United Farm Workers, Luis Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino, various Chicano artists established groups such as Asco and Los Four, and student demonstrations shut down minority high schools like Lincoln and Garfield. The grim culmination came in 1970. An anti-Vietnam War rally in the barrio stampeded into riot when the cops decided to break it up. Times columnist Ruben Salazar was killed by a sheriff’s department gas projectile.

Understandably none of this is directly addressed by Self-Help’s celebratory show, but the seepage is unmistakable. Sister Boccalero’s shrine is like an inevitably touching snapshot album unfolded to display images that show her slowly melt from a blossoming child to weathered age. Nearby, a large wooden cut-out representing a blue “Barrio Mobile Art Studio” recalls an early Self-Help outreach program.

Across the way, Ofelia Esparza erected a traditional Mexican Day of the Dead altar. A mass of flowers both real and otherwise, it’s surrounded with candles and punctuated with bread, corn tamale husks, personal mementos and sugar skulls.

The head-bone motif animates numerous posters that casually festoon the walls. It’s very much in the neighborhood street-dance spirit of this event that images lack the usual museum-style labels. They do act as a reminder that Self-Help’s main activity and claim to fame is the production of innovative screen prints.

With a little effort, one picks out Victor Ochoa’s “Border Bingo.” Its cartoon-style panels caricature types involved in the drama of illegal border crossing. There’s a hooker, paramilitary guard, tourist, punk and a hard-working housekeeper in the form of a plastic detergent bottle.

The capacity of such work to be simultaneously funny and furious echoes in other examples by Gronk, John Valadez, Leo Limon, Armando Norte and a particularly acerbic sendup of the Carmen Miranda stereotype in Alex Donis’ “Rio, Por No Llorar” (I Laugh to Keep From Crying).

*

* Self-Help Graphics, 3802 Cesar E. Chavez Ave.; through Feb. 28, closed Mondays, (213) 881-6444.