Urgent: SAVE Self Help Graphics & Art

LOS ANGELES COMMUNITY DEMANDS ANSWERS

Community is Outraged that Catholic Archdiocese Secretly Sells Self Help Graphics & Arts Historic Building

Los Angeles, July 11, 2008 — Over the last 24 hours elected officials, community leaders, artists and residents throughout Los Angeles expressed their outrage that the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese secretly sold the mosaic building that is home to Self Help Graphics & Art. After its founding by Catholic nun Sister Karen Boccalero more than 35 years ago, non-profit organization Self Help Graphics & Arts was notified that the Catholic Archdiocese sold the building to a private real estate and investment company. The organization had no knowledge of the sale or pending sale. Community leaders including Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina made it abundantly clear that the Archdiocese must explain its actions.

We need answers, Supervisor Molina said. “The Archdiocese’s blatant disrespect for the community is unacceptable. I commit to working with Self Help Graphics & Art to mobilize my elected official colleagues and other community leaders to demand that the archdiocese tell us why they mishandled this situation and how they plan to correct it.”

As long as the organization continued to fulfill the mission of advancing Chicano and Latino art and developing local and emerging artists, the Sisters of St. Francis, Mount Alverno agreed to allow Self Help Graphics & Art to use the building. With record-breaking print fairs, community festivals such as its iconic Dia de los Muertos celebration which draws thousands of attendees and artists both emerging and veteran flocking to the organization as a place to cultivate their art, Self Help has been undergoing a renaissance. Last Fall Self Help board members were told that the building was not on the list of sites to be sold as part of the Archdiocese’s attempt to raise funds to pay the settlement to individuals who successfully sued the church for sexual abuse.

A spokesperson for the Sisters of St. Francis alleges that Self Help Graphics & Art failed to secure a grant to purchase the building, leading the sisters to transfer title to the archdiocese. They also allege that the organization was struggling financially. 

“It is preposterous to believe that one attempt at a grant a year ago should signal the Sisters and Archdiocese to move forward with a sale with no notice whatsoever,” said Self Help board of directors president Armando Duron. “Common human decency would have been to give us a deadline for purchase.” 

After closing its doors for three months in 2005, Self Help has experienced resurgence with the help of an untold number of volunteers and the support of the community at large. With no federal or state subsidies or major private grants, the organization has thrived in its array of programs and services to the community. Sales for prints from some of the nation’s leading Latino artists and up-and-coming artists have been booming. The organization is considered by scholars and artists as one of the birthplaces of Chicano art.

“For nearly 40 years, Self-Help Graphics has been one of the major community-based arts centers serving Los Angeles. It has earned international recognition for its contributions to the graphic arts and for being a model of community-based art making and art-based community making. In the last three years, Self Help has reinvented itself as a self-sustaining organization, and it has shown the continued vitality and relevance of its mission by reaching new generations of artists and community members through innovative programs and cutting edge artistic production,” said Chon Noriega, professor and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA.

The terms of the sale from the new owner allow Self Help to remain in the building rent free until December 31, 2008.

Stephen Saiz, Self Help board vice president said the organization will be working with the community, elected officials, foundations, fellow arts institutions and other community leaders to determine the future for the organization.

“We have had a relationship with the Church for almost 40 years and expected them to value that relationship and more importantly, the service we provide to the community” Saiz said. “We are not going to allow their needs for funds to pay off their debts stop us from that service.”

Self Help Graphics & Art is a nationally recognized center for Chicano and Latino arts that develops and nurtures artists and printmaking. Self Help Graphics & Art seeks to advance Chicano and Latino art broadly through programming, exhibitions and outreach to diverse audiences in East Los Angeles and beyond. Self Help Graphics & Art seeks to identify young and emerging artists from the community in all aspects of its activities.

Spatial Location: Jürgen Mayer H.

Mexico also made its official debut at the Venice Biennele, renting a labyrinthine Gothic palazzo near the Rialto Bridge that looks like something out of a Tolkien fever dream, with a high interior courtyard flanked by a winding stone staircase. The exhibition, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, is the opposite of the don’t-touch art that fills most of this city. Every piece requires some kind of participation.

Art in Focus

Anton Kannemeyer is the gifted, white South African creator of fearlessly satiric comic books. A 40-year-old Cape Town resident, he is widely known as an editor of Bittercomix, a magazine he founded with the artist Conrad Botes in 1992. Mr. Kannemeyer’s most appealing works are comics made under the pseudonym Joe Dog, which expertly imitate the style of Hergé’s comics starring Tintin, the boy adventurer and world-roving personification of Western colonialism.

The beauty of Mr. Kannemeyer’s work is in the jarringly funny contrast between its cheerful, seemingly innocent style and its reflection of the hideous underbelly of South African politics and society. The exhibition features paintings on paper from a series in which each piece represents a letter of the alphabet. “N is for nightmare” depicts a presumably white person’s peaceful, suburban home with circular vignettes representing two black men, one brandishing a spear and the other a machete, and a black woman serving a white man’s head on a platter.

Book Review

Courtesy of NY Times: BRIGHT SHINY MORNING By James Frey

He wrote a book but it was bad, liar bad, faker bad, it got him in trouble. A million little pieces. It was the name of the book. It was also how hard he got hit. He had to sit there on the couch. Everybody saw. The television celebrity book club woman got mad, she let him have it. He had to sit there on the couch. He squirmed, he cringed. Everybody watched, everybody blamed him. Then it was over. Then he was gone.

He wrote a big book. He wrote about a city. Los Angeles. He made up a lot of characters, high low rich poor lucky not, every kind, the book threw them together. It was random but smart. Every now and then he would pause the story, switch to the present tense and throw in an urban fact.

Like this: The Los Angeles area has a museum devoted to the banana.

He wrote about people who were drawn to Los Angeles and who they were, why they came, what they wanted, whether they got it, if they didn’t get that, then what they got instead. He looked into their hearts. But he didn’t get sloppy, not maudlin. He just made up characters and wrote as if he cared about them desperately. Bright Shiny Morning. A new chance, real or illusory, that’s what they all wanted. Bright Shiny Morning. So he made that the name of the book.

And Esperanza, Mexican-American, working as a maid for an old white lady so mean she threw her morning cup of coffee if Esperanza didn’t make it right. But the old lady turned out to have a son. He liked Esperanza, liked treating her like a human being. Maybe he liked needling his mother even better.

There were easy ways a cynical, sentimental crybaby like the million little pieces guy could have told Esperanza’s part of the story. Crisis, violence, redemption, whatever: that’s what he knew about. That’s what he wrote about. That’s what he passed off as nonfiction. That’s why he sounded as if he’d seen too many lousy movies.

Liberia Martinez

 

Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times 

Rueben Martinez, owner of Libreria Martinez Books and Art Gallery in Santa Ana, might have to close his shop by year’s end despite the store’s renown as one of the nation’s largest Latino-themed bookstores.“I knew I was never going to get rich selling books,” Martinez says. “But the crowds are not what they used to be.”

Ruebén Martinez’s Libreria Martinez has become a cultural focal point in Santa Ana and a magnet for famous authors. But dwindling customers and landlord pressure may put him out of business.

When Ruebén Martinez set up his bookshop in an old Santa Ana furniture store a decade ago, he bargained the landlord down to half-price rent, saying he sold books, not diamonds. 

But despite its renown as one of the nation’s largest Latino-themed bookstores, Librería Martinez, owned by the barber-turned-MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner, may be forced to close by year’s end.

• 
  
  

Sales are down 50% from a year ago and bills are piling up. A new landlord, the Orange County High School of the Arts, which wants to use the store for classrooms, has given Martinez a year to find a new location.

“I knew I was never going to get rich selling books,” Martinez said. “But the crowds are not what they used to be.”

The store that began as a shelf in Martinez’s barbershop in 1993 has grown into a local institution with an international draw, bringing in hundreds of authors, such as literary giants Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez and Carlos Fuentes and high-profile speakers, including Nobel Peace Prize-winning Costa Rica President Oscar Arias.

Anchored by Martinez’s mission — to get people of all ages to read, in English or Spanish — the store has prospered as a community center, holding English and music classes, and where residents can attend a poetry reading or pick up a book or magazine.

A sign outside commands “¡Todos a Leer!” – Let’s Read, Everyone!

They may be reading, but lately they’re not buying enough.

Martinez’s troubles mirror those familiar to nearly every independent bookshop: rising rent, fewer people buying books, and competition from online and big-box retailers that can offer discounts.

The Brentwood literary landmark Dutton’s closed last month. Another Latino bookstore, Tia Chucha’s in the San Fernando Valley, last year had to move after the landlord tripled the rent and replaced it with a laundromat.

“We don’t have bookstores in most neighborhoods in the L.A. area,” said owner Luis Rodriguez. “Everybody talks about how literacy is so important, so there’s got to be ways to help with rent subsidies.”

Boyle Heights

The release of a 100-foot mural by artist Sandow Birk has sparked outrage amongst some residents of Boyle Heights, the infamous East LA barrio that was the site of the Chicano Power movement. The homogenouse nature of the Latino community, a portrait that elected officials and the media like to portray, is an invalid description of the multi-ethnic and multi-generational barrio. In Birk’s mural, Latinos are portrayed near a cop car, selling illegal goods, and in ‘unhealthy’ body types. Many people are outraged, claiming that the mural presents a stigmatized portrait of Latinos and moreover does not represent the Boyle Heights community.

First off, the artist is a non-Latino/non-person of Color who ‘lives/lived’ in the community. At first glance its a classic case of the outside looking in and defining the other. However, a deeper look at the protests’ talking points reveal a larger paradigm, Boyle Heights is a heterogenous, mixed-income, multi-generational community. It always has been. Since the Japanese American Museum currated an impressive exhibit about the region, tagging it as the first immigrant community. Boyle Heights was home to Russians, Mexicans, Japanese, Italians, and other ethnic communities. Moreover, the community was strong, united, even during the horrid internment of their Japansese neighbors and peers.

This is still true today. Albeit Latinos themselves encompass a diverse range of geographic locations, linguistic tongues, and more, the increased migration of Asians into the community have made it even more diverse. Also, for decades Boyle Heights has been the hub of Chicano families, many of whom have owned their properties for generations, intensifying the factions of economic class within the neighborhood. The instances of race, class, and intersectionality make the protests agains Birk’s mural valid and believable. Boyle Heights is not a community that is easily defined, and in the 21st century it is definately not defined by street vendors, overweight brown faces, or criminalization.

 Public art must be inclusive, accessible, and culturally compentant to all community members. This is not to say an artist’s vision must follow these parameters, but it is to say dissent and oppositional discourse is allowed and cultural criticism by community members is valid. Afterall, Boyle Heights has the largest concentration of murals in the entire city; Birk’s mural isn’t anything new.

Blog Featured in Smashing Magazine Contest

Background: This contest hosted by Smashing Magazine online presents the results of the contest — 45 beautiful blog header designs you can use for free. 38 graphic designers and artists participated; as a result  over 100 truly outstanding entries have been submitted and the best ones are displayed here. Among the best, are Nuestra Senora and Betsyness, both of which are designed by an up and coming graphic designer located in the greater D.C. area. Both entries are pasted below:

Nuestra Señora

full view | download (jpg + psd, 1.7 Mb)
“This is a header graphic for my friend’s blog. This is how she initially described it to me: “I have decided on a name for the blog: Nuestra Señora. It is adapted from Los Angeles’ original name: Pueblo de la Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula. Plus it is feminine. I think it suits the blog. I am not sure if other people use the same name on their blogs.

So the concept for the blog is: Los Angeles city politics infused with pop culture. I want to provide a counter-perspective to the city from a life-long Angelino and integrate art, culture, fashion, and more. But again, its all about how the city is changing, I want to be a cynic but also a resource. The blog should be an artifact. I need to write and be creative. The more I think about it, the more I want multiple blogs, but maybe we can do that later or make tabs on the blog page itself. I would like to talk about US politics, the world, pop culture, gossip, everything that encompasses my daily life.” Designed by graphic designer extraordinaire Besty Chang, Washington, D.C.

Betsyness

full view | download (jpg, 60 Kb)

url: http://www.betsyness.com
“I’m in the process of creating a website to showcase some of my drawings and paintings. I wanted this header graphic to reflect on my personal style and although created in perhaps the hallmark of the digital art process, Photoshop, to still have a hand-drawn essence to it.”

Art & Culture in a 21st Century Iraq

Artist: Dhia Khuzae / Courtesy of Afnan Gallery

Downtown LA

Click to see full image