Self-Help Graphics Settles Into New LA Home

Perhaps you have never visited Self-Help Graphics in Los Angeles, but if you had, you would have never forgotten the experience. It was a really cool place where really cool people went to hang out and do cool things for 41 years. At least that’s how I remember it. Adolfo Guzman-Lopez wrote a great piece about the recent move of the organization to Boyle Heights:

There was just too much history, too many artists who’ve gotten their start there, too many children’s art workshops, too many Dia De Los Muertos street parades, too many punk rock, jarocho, and hip hop concerts, and poetry on that rickety second story stage. And too many midnight philosophizing on that steel platform at the top of the stairs with the green Sears neon in the distance as the Alexandria lighthouse for Chicanos from all over the country…

She was the first professional artist to give many young Chicanos in the early 1970s a chance to learn how to make art with professional techniques and the new voice of Chicano activism. She ran and embodied Self Help Graphics while letting in people who worked hard and had something to say. The religious order that owned the group’s two story headquarters for the arts revolution in East LA gave it nearly free rent. The religious order sold the building in 2008 and the rent shot up to the heavens.

There’s lots more at the link, neat LA story.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD