Review: Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking, edited by Tatiana Reinoza and Karen Mary Davalos

In 2023, Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Sister Karen Boccalero, Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibañez, and Frank Hernández founded the community arts center as a nonprofit organization in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1973, supported by a gift from the Order of the Sisters of St. Francis. Since its founding, SHG has undergone site changes and economic challenges but has remained a center for art, community, and social justice. The center has had its critics. For example, in 2016, Boyle Heights activists accused SHG of “sell[ing] out” (Brittny Mejia and Steve Saldivar, “Boyle Heights activists blame the art galleries for gentrification,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2016). Tatiana Reinoza and Karen Mary Davalos’s edited anthology Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking rethinks the center’s history and legacy of social practice, outreach programs, radical countervisualities, and crosscultural,...