Edition Prints/Serigraphs

Margaret Garcia Chicano prints from Self-Help Graphic’s Atelier Series, 1980’s and 1990’s

Self-Help Graphics - Why S-HG Matters.

“Self Help Graphics & Art (S-HG), a community art center based in East Los Angeles, has been an integral part of Chicano art production since its foundation in 1970. S-HG played a critical role in the Chicano movement and the art of printmaking was a means to expand activism around civil rights and ethnic pride.

The deployment of printmaking as a vehicle for grassroots organizing and political and social commentary was profoundly influenced by Mexican artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Jose Guadalupe Posada, Leopoldo Méndez, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as art collective Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City. Drawing upon these influences, Franciscan nun Sister Karen Boccalero formed S-HG, joining a wave of other Chicano printmakers in Chicago, San Francisco, and Sacramento …

… Established in Boyle Heights, S-HG was enormously successful in promoting Chicano artists and outreaching to young Latino artists throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and was a means to celebrate Chicano culture, to empower a political voice, and to generate art that was rooted in Mexican tradition and that bypassed the mainstream art world. The Chicano self-empowerment movement drove the vision of S-HG. Artists created art, held their own exhibitions, and sold their work on their own terms. 

In 1982, S-HG began its seminal Experimental Screenprint Atelier, a workshop program that allowed artists to create high-quality limited edition prints using methods such as serigraphy, intaglio, and lithography. This new direction offered Chicano artists a foray into the mainstream art world and art market. During the 1990s, S=HG sought a more outward-facing posture and began seeking to disseminate Chicano art to a wider audience. S-HG organized the travelling exhibition, Chicano Expressions, and donated numerous artworks to archives and museums… “

Note: S-HG has a policy of sharing with the artists. S-HG provides all materials, working space, a master printer and administration; while the artist provide sweat equity in the form of design and participatiion in the life of the gallery which includes participation in numerous exhibitions throughout Souther California and beyond. The edition prints were shared between the artist and S-HG. The artist retained the odd-numbered sheets while S-HG retained the even-numbered sheets. S-HG has either sold or donated all of the prints of Margaret Garcia and now has none.

Why it Matters (above) is quoted from the Riverside Art Museum’s introduction for it’s 2016 exhibit: Self Help Graphics: Aztlán, the Permanent Collection, and Beyond