A changing imprint

For many people in East Los Angeles, Self Help Graphics is more than a community arts center, it’s an institution.

The building on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, with its distinctive murals, has for years housed a printmaking shop that served as one of the early incubators for the Chicano art movement in California. Many noted artists who launched their careers there remain active, visible members of the community. Of the center’s ongoing events, like its popular Day of the Dead festivities, many have become Eastside traditions.

But today, more than 30 years after it was founded by a Franciscan nun in a Boyle Heights garage, Self Help Graphics & Art is evolving. Driven by ambitions to make it an indispensable cultural center for the entire region, Self Help is building links past its Eastside roots and planning more innovative programming.

In recent years, its expansive print collection by some of the most recognizable names in Chicano art has attracted the attention of museums, galleries, schools and collectors, from coast to coast and globally, from South Africa to Scotland.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is finalizing the largest acquisition of prints from Self Help in the center’s history, said Tomas Benitez, Self Help’s executive director. The acquisition is expected to total about 500 prints that range from the printmaking workshop’s beginnings, when the output was for the most part political in content, to the latest work by artists as young as 17, Benitez said.

Beyond that, Self Help’s leaders say they are working to make fundamental changes at a place some still identify as a grass-roots home base for Latino artists in Los Angeles.

The shift reflects a broader change of focus among some Latino artists and theorists. Many believe that Latino urban culture has outgrown the ideology of Chicano nationalism and is turning to the idea of the “post-border metropolis” that stretches from Tijuana to Los Angeles as the new cultural vanguard.

This new way of thinking, some say, is being driven by a rising generation of artists taking the helm of Self Help’s activities.

“The challenge we have is to create a space that’s more critical, more daring intellectually,” says Gustavo Leclerc, Self Help’s newly hired artistic director, “a space for a new discourse, and it seems to me that’s a new paradigm.”

It’s talk that’s making some old school members of the Eastside arts community slightly apprehensive.

Shifra Goldman, who has documented the Chicano art movement in several books and papers, says she is worried that longtime East L.A. artists would be alienated if the working philosophy at Self Help Graphics turns away from primarily showing Chicano art and “also Chicano issues.”

“I would hate to see a problematic [change] that has to do with something that is very sophisticated and not amenable,” Goldman says.

Born of politics

Vigilance over Self Help’s legacy is understandable.

Grass-roots arts organizations and collectives sprung up on the Eastside at the height of the Chicano political movement in the early 1970s, but many gradually closed down or disbanded over time. Today, Self Help is one of only a few survivors.

When Sister Karen Boccalero and her associates opened a printmaking shop and gallery on what was then called Brooklyn Avenue near Soto Street, the artists who came to them were “few, very marginal and hadn’t been accepted,” Goldman says.

Sister Karen, as she’s still called today, wanted to nurture a place where the largely Latino Eastside arts community could empower itself by creating art in its own space, by its own rules, thus the name. Printmaking was central to those goals because many artists started out making political posters for Chicano political rallies and the high school walkouts of 1968.

Self Help quickly became a beloved meeting place for Latino artists and members of the surrounding community. As it expanded, the center moved to an old Christian Youth Organization building farther east. Many Chicano artists who built printmaking skills at Self Help early on, including Frank Romero, Gronk and Patssi Valdez, matured into established gallery draws.

“She gave a lot of Chicanos a break,” says Romero, the widely exhibited member of the one of the first Chicano art collectives, Los Four. “Everybody’s been through there, everyone.”

When she died in 1997, Sister Karen was memorialized as a matriarch of the movement. Almost immediately, though, voices from across the Latino arts community wondered aloud if Self Help could survive without her.

“The minute she died, we had a bunch of people say, ‘Oh, now what’s going to happen?’ ” recalls Benitez, who served as Sister Karen’s assistant. “I had to get on the phone and say, ‘We’re here, we’re fine’ ... and we went to work.”

Benitez became executive director after Sister Karen’s death, and strengthening the center’s fiscal foundation became a priority. Self Help also grew: In 1997 it employed five people with an annual operating budget of about $340,000; this year the center employs about 20 people and operates at $870,000, Benitez says.

Its annual Corazones fundraiser auction is now a fancy affair that has been attended by A-list Latinos in politics, arts and business, such as actor Cheech Marin, a collector of Chicano art; Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa; and Antonia Hernandez, former director of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Major events at Self Help are partly underwritten by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, the Andy Warhol Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, Union Bank of Southern California and other public agencies and corporations.

Self Help’s leaders say now is the time to push the center to the next level, culturally and intellectually. And the person driving this push is Leclerc, a Mexican-born and -educated artist, curator and urban theorist hired in May to fill the new position of artistic director.

The disappearing border

Leclerc, a native of Veracruz, arrived in the U.S. in 1986. He has taught urban studies at several Southern California architecture and design schools and most recently directed the Border Cultures Project at USC.

In his writing and curatorial projects, Leclerc has distinguished himself in the growing field of border studies. Last year he co-edited with USC geography professor Michael Dear the book “Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California.” In 2002 he and Dear co-curated “Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis” at USC’s Fisher Gallery.

Both projects position Los Angeles as the region’s “post-border” capital, a “transnational mega-city” where Third World collides with First. To Leclerc and his colleagues, the border region is a hybrid space with cultural tentacles that reach far beyond the hugging hamlets of San Ysidro and northern Tijuana.

It is within this theoretical framework that Leclerc says he hopes to position Self Help, and his vision of how to do this is uncompromisingly ambitious.

“I want to investigate the cultural dynamics of this region; I want to create a more theoretical framework,” he says. “Self Help Graphics has a solid foundation, but we need to put ourselves more in an international position. With that comes a more self-critical look at what we do.”

Leclerc envisions more exhibitions in Galeria Otra Vez -- Self Help’s gallery space -- that push the envelope of what is considered Chicano or Latino art, with shows that are organized not from “a subject-based approach, more like an aesthetic-based approach.” He also wants to bring in master printers from other parts of the world for workshops and start a lecture series.

“It’s time for experimenting,” he said.

The time is right, says Chon Noriega, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. Noriega sees Leclerc’s cultural outlook as just one of many Self Help could explore in the coming years.

“We’re probably about 10 years past the point where there’s going to be a single idea of what Chicano art is,” Noriega says, noting that many artists who have worked at Self Help are Central American, biracial or even non-Latino blacks, Asians and whites. “The community is too large and too diverse to fit under one aesthetic rubric; we’ve got too many generations.”

But for some with deep roots on the eastern slopes of the L.A. River, where mariachis still stroll the nighttime sidewalks and taco stands operate in private driveways, such rhetoric prompts the doubt that often accompanies change.

Benitez, for instance, says he’s been stopped on the street by Self Help artists and patrons concerned that he might have been pushed aside after a mass mailing went out from Leclerc introducing himself to the community. Benitez says he has had to reassure people that he remains in charge.

In mid-June, Leclerc called an open meeting of Self Help artists to talk about where to take the center next. One who attended said there was a clear sense of disconnect between old and new.

But change is inevitable, says artist Leo Limon, a self-described member of the Chicano art old school. In his day of high school walkouts and anti-Vietnam War activism, Limon says, the concerns were far different than those facing today’s artists.

“It was all Chicano power, all Chicano power,” says Limon.

Limon emerged from the movement as an established muralist and painter. He recalls with open fondness walking into Sister Karen’s space and being taken aback by the energy and optimism he found there.

“When Sister Karen was around it was about bringing art to the community, to the kids,” Limon says. “Now they’re professionals, now they’re collectors. And this generation didn’t grow up with the movement. The framework has changed ideologically.”

That’s the idea, according to Self Help artists like Veronica Soto, 27, who says, “Right now we’re at this weird schism in time” in Self Help’s history.

Soto, a daughter of Mexican immigrants who still lives in her native South Gate, in many ways represents the new guard at Self Help. She is a painter and printmaker who has exhibited in the Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica. Soto had two canvases in “13 y 13 = el futuro,” Self Help’s June show at Galeria Otra Vez focusing on “emerging Chicana/o artists.” Whether at Otis College of Art and Design, where she is studying for a master of fine arts degree, or at Self Help, where she manages the print loan program, Soto says she confronts the duality of being a first-generation Mexican American artist.

In the mainstream art community, when Soto works within a recognizable Chicano aesthetic, “I’m told not to ghettoize myself.” And, within the Chicano art community, “the weight of history is still there,” Soto says. “There’s no way of getting around it.”

So she responds with work that she says reflects the concerns -- and pop affections -- of her generation.

One piece included in Self Help’s ever-expanding print collection that perhaps typifies the cultural landscape of young Chicano artists is “Mozatlan,” a two-tone portrait of Morrissey, the lead singer of the ‘80s British new wave band the Smiths.

“I like how, especially in L.A., he has a huge Latino following,” Soto says.

Part of ‘L.A.’s legacy’

Both within Self Help Graphics and outside of it, a LACMA acquisition is seen as the topmost sign that the place is maturing beyond what anyone might have envisioned when it welcomed its first batch of East L.A. artists.

Officials at the county museum declined to discuss the matter in detail, saying no comment is made on purchases until they are finalized. A LACMA spokesman noted that the museum has a positive history of partnership with Self Help and already owns about 60% of its archives.

Several people at Self Help, including Benitez and curator Christina Ochoa, said the acquisition is fueled by a goal of eventually staging a LACMA exhibition that would span the history of printmaking at Self Help.

“It’s the appropriate institution to do it,” says Richard Duardo, a printmaker and member of LACMA’s Graphics Art Council, a membership-based group that raises money to support print acquisitions.

The prospect thrills Benitez, who calls Self Help’s prints part of “L.A.’s legacy.”

A legacy that, in recent years, has been visible at museums and galleries across the country and around the globe. In 1994, the center organized its own print exhibition, “Chicano Expressions,” which traveled to South Africa, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Asia. Self Help prints also have been seen in London and Scotland and in galleries all over the East Coast and Midwest.

The historical influence of Self Help Graphics is highlighted in the traveling exhibition, “Chicano Visions,” drawn almost entirely from Cheech Marin’s collection and on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla. The museum curated a special adjunct exhibition of Self Help prints made by several of the artists featured in the main show that will be seen only at La Jolla.

But with the enormous growth comes some compromises, Benitez acknowledges. The center’s financial growth is largely because of increasing interest in Chicano art among corporate donors (such as the Nissan and Toyota companies, which showcase Self Help prints in their corporate headquarters during Hispanic Heritage Month).

“I got criticized last year by some of the old guard: ‘Hey, man, don’t give away Day of the Dead,’ ” Benitez says. “Day of the Dead continues to be this huge thing. But most of it is free.”

Since Benitez took over, he noted, the number of artists who come through Self Help each year has grown from about 200 to roughly 800. “The primary audiences are artists, but you can’t keep doing it as a small operation when you have increasing demand.”

Today, Benitez adds, as other art institutions “come up and die and fold, the demand falls back to us.... I have to get sponsorship, otherwise we can’t do it.”

Contact Daniel Hernandez at daniel.hernandez@latimes.com.