Self Help in dire need of rescue

The lights are out in an area of the second floor at Self Help Graphics & Art, East L.A.’s pioneering nonprofit that has been a beacon for Latino artists for more than three decades. During the recent storms, leaks bedeviled the landmark building on Cesar Chavez Avenue, frying electrical circuits and eating away at walls and ceilings from the roof to the first-floor gift store.

Tomas Benitez, the organization’s executive director, inspected the damage outside his corner office Thursday evening, winding his way in the dark around large plastic buckets on the floor and past computers covered in blue tarps for protection. He pointed to the creeping purple splotches of mold forming around a fluorescent ceiling fixture that doesn’t work. Then on one water-swollen wall, he ran his fingers along a growing crack in the peeling paint, as if searching for a spot to plug a bulging dike.

Benitez made a fist and lightly punched the crumbling surface. Small pieces of damp paint and plaster flaked to the floor.

“This is really hard,” says the beleaguered manager, mentally figuring the cost of repairs he can’t afford. “This is [worth] a part-time clerical salary right here.”

Nowadays, everything has become a survival calculation at Self Help Graphics, which has been struggling with a looming fiscal crisis since the summer. Just before Christmas, the nationally acclaimed arts organization was forced to let go half a dozen employees and postpone several planned exhibitions. Other positions have been left vacant by attrition, leaving only a skeleton staff to try to keep the organization afloat.

Self Help was founded in a Boyle Heights garage 32 years ago by a Franciscan nun named Sister Karen Boccalero. It blossomed from a grass-roots space for little-known local artists to a vital community center with an international reputation. It remains one of the few surviving arts organizations on the Eastside, offering a theater for performing arts, a print and metal workshop for artists, a gallery space and regularly scheduled classes for students.

The organization now faces its worst crisis since 1987, when the Whittier earthquake forced authorities to condemn the 75-year-old building, Benitez says. This time, Self Help has been shaken by a perfect storm of separate problems: funding cuts, staff turnover and admittedly bad planning.

Benitez, burned out to the point of fearing for his health, took a three-month sabbatical last year, even as the agency’s financial woes mounted. He returned in the fall to find an organization adrift. Then came the recent rains, turning Self Help’s budget problems into a financial deluge.

“You get all those things together, it’s like that Frida Kahlo painting, death by a thousand nicks,” says Benitez, chronic stress etched into deep rings under his eyes. “One thing bleeds. Ten of them, you’ve got a hemorrhage.”

Despite the troubles, the remaining staff of eight vows to keep open the agency that nurtured the careers of such artists as Gronk and Frank Romero. Before last year’s layoffs, a proposal was floated to shut down Self Help for 30 days to save money. Instead, workers decided to take a pay cut.

“There’s just no way we could close down, not even for a month, because it would be that much harder to reopen,” says Christina Ochoa, director of the Galeria Otra Vez. “No, we need to fight. I’m not going to give it up just like that.”

Experts say the loss of Self Help would be a blow to the arts community and the city as a whole. “I think we would lose one of the major entry points for younger artists, both in terms of producing and exhibiting their works,” said Chon Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, which has collaborated with Self Help to archive and preserve its print collection. “And the general L.A. community would lose a valuable place to go and appreciate and acquire fine art produced by local artists.”

Benitez took over as director in 1997 after Sister Karen’s death. Since then, he says, the annual budget has more than doubled from $324,000 to $750,000. But the expansion also brought growing pains.

“We grew past what we could do,” Benitez admits.

Three years ago, the agency undertook a $5-million capital campaign to renovate its distinctive building, partly sheathed in a colorful mosaic made of ceramic and tile shards embedded in cement.

The effort was ambitious, but the timing was terrible.

The campaign was launched Sept. 1, 2001, just before the terrorist attacks on the U.S. changed everything.

“Ten days later, our capital campaign was over, baby,” Benitez says. “Twin towers went down, and the funding climate shifted. Now, the last thing the funding community wants to hear is you whining, ‘Oh, 9/11 did us in.’ But it didn’t help.”

Since then, Self Help has been struggling with severe cutbacks in public funding that have hurt the entire arts community. The agency has suffered reductions at all levels of support, federal, state and city.

Self Help limped to the close of the last fiscal year with a $140,000 budget shortfall, according to a financial report provided by Benitez. During the year ending June 30, the agency had $776,000 in expenses, almost two-thirds in payroll costs, but only $637,000 in income. Most of that income came from private foundations and corporations ($222,000), plus fundraising and earnings from sales and commissions ($260,000). Government funding accounted for roughly one-fifth of total revenue, just under $137,000.

Since July 1, the fiscal hole has only gotten deeper.

Benitez says he returned from his sabbatical to find that anticipated funding totaling $100,000 had not come through. Plus, money did not materialize to back the $35,000 part-time salary of the newly hired artistic director, Gustavo Leclerc, brought on board to steer the group in new creative directions.

Leclerc could not be reached for comment. His proposals have been shelved for lack of funding.

“We are working so close to the bone, it’s hard to keep positive and pointed forward,” Benitez says. “We do it. We fortify each other. But my job has become sweating payrolls and trying to figure out how to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

The strongest assets of Self Help have always been priceless -- its reputation as a community-based group that sticks to principle and the loyalty of staff and supporters.

Thursday afternoon, Ochoa, the gallery director, was the only employee working on the second floor of the cold and musty building. She’s pressing forward with plans for an erotic adults-only exhibition, “Better Than Naked II,” which opens Feb. 5. And she’s planning a designer showcase in March to build up a market for Self Help artists among filmmakers, set designers and interior designers.

“At times, it feels very empty,” she says. “It feels a little lifeless out here working alone. But I’m very determined. We may be hanging on by these little threads, but we’re going to build ourselves up again.”

Ochoa also met with John Valadez, one of the artists taking part in a collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in an exhibition pairing scientists and artists, which opens Feb. 20.

Meanwhile, at a nearby desk, former programs coordinator Azucena Maldonado was at the computer at her old desk, polishing up her resume. She was one of two full-time staffers laid off in December, and she’s now “looking to see what’s out there” as far as new job opportunities.

Remarkably, she harbors no resentments.

“I love Self Help and I would just do anything for it,” says Maldonado, who moved to L.A. from Texas. “Just being here these two years, I saw the love the artists have for this space. And I can see why. To lose it would leave such a void in the community. And it would have such a rippling effect because so many people in the country know about Chicano art and its roots because of Self Help Graphics.”