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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles Main Menu Research of the Decades Research 1960s Illustration Development Illustration Development Playlists of the Decades Playlists Great Wall Institute - Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC)

Kids participate in a print making workshop at Self Help Graphics, 1973.

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From Organizing to Organizations (The Women's Building, The Crenshaw Women's Center, SPARC...) Gina Leon
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1. Feminist Health Movement From its earliest days in the 1960s, the women's liberation movement focused on abortion and women's right to control their bodies. Some of the more radical groups engaged in underground abortion clinics, most notably in Chicago; others, like the Boston's Women's Health Collective began writing/publishing projects; and organizations like NOW formed Task Forces to work on the issue of reproductive rights. In fact, it was in NOW that leaders of the feminist health movement, Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman, first became active and initially demonstrated gynecological self-examination. And while Downer and Rothman went on to open the first Feminist Women's Health Center at the Crenshaw Women's Center, other women, like Vi Verreaux worked at and opened more conventionally structured, service-oriented clinics for women. This series is comprised of interviews with these three women. The long interviews with Downer and Rothman document the evolution and expansion of their work, and although the much shorter interview with Verreaux barely touches on her clinic work, it does provides a glimpse into a service-oriented, community-based clinic.
2. The Crenshaw Women’s Center The CRENSHAW WOMEN’S CENTER was the first women’s center in Los Angeles and was a ground-breaking facility serving women in a variety of capacities. It housed the nation’s first women’s clinic, Women’s Self-Help One, and was the site of The Great Yogurt Conspiracy. In three action-packed years, the Crenshaw Women’s Center generated an enormous amount of energy, pivotal change, and several firsts for the Women’s Rights Movement and second-wave feminism in Los Angeles and the nation. A Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM) application was prepared and submitted to the city of Los Angeles by Kate Eggert and Krisy Gosney.
3. 1973 - 1991 The Woman’s Building
4. Kids participate in a print making workshop at Self Help Graphics, 1973.
5. Artists working at Self Help Graphics in East LA during the 1970s (Self Help Graphics and Art). People working at Self Help Graphics in East LA during the 1970s (Self Help Graphics and Art). The evolution SHG’s focus on printmaking as its core discipline grew throughout the 1970s and by 1979 the programs became increasingly experimental, in the printmaking studio and in other media, including music and performance art. During the 1980s, SHG earned its reputation as a locus for the emerging Chicano and Latino artists and cultural movements. Sister Karen passed away in 1997 and facilities and financial management continued to impart the organization’s health during the twenty-first century. A significant revival has been in process since 2007, including a major relocation from the former headquarters on Cesar Chavez Avenue to a new location in Boyle Heights, adjacent to downtown Los Angeles. https://www.selfhelpgraphics.com/history.
6. 1973 Self Help Graphics 3 Established in the wake of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, Self Help Graphics & Art (1973–present), quickly became an invaluable community art center and site for the production and promotion of Chicanx and Latinx art. Founded by Sister Karen Boccalero, a Franciscan nun and student of Sister Corita Kent, along with artists Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez, and Frank Hernández in an East LA garage, Self Help Graphics understood art production as a social practice, and sought to fortify the local community through arts education and art-making that celebrated Chicanx identities and experiences.
7. 1973 Self Help Graphics 4
8. 1976 Self Help Graphics Día de los Muertos 1 In the 1970s, a procession of floats traveled from Evergreen Cemetery to Self-Help Graphics in Boyle Heights on Día de los Muertos. The first public Día de los Muertos celebration in LA was held nearly 50 years ago at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. Up until then, observance was a largely private tradition with Indigenous roots in Mexico. Ofrendas, or altars, were constructed inside the home. Public participation in the holiday largely stems from the art and activism ignited by the 1970 Chicano Moratorium and movement for civil rights.
9. 1976 Self Help Graphics Día de los Muertos 2
10. Day of the Dead ’77 Procession, Self-Help Graphics, November 1977.
11. 1977 Self Help Graphics Día de los Muertos 2 Day of the Dead ’77, Self-Help Graphics, November 1977. Beginning in 1973, the trio of founders and affiliated artists partnered to redeploy the Mexican Día de Muertos for their neighborhoods in East Los Angeles. A Catholic and Indigenous Mexican celebration of the dead, Día de Muertos is traditionally celebrated on November 2, although preparations begin the week before when celebrants prepare and gather decorations, mementos, specific foods, and flowers, and construct altars of remembrance at the cemetery or in their homes.
12. A float designed for Día de Los Muertos by Leo Limon processes down Brooklyn Avenue, November 1977.

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1970s Research Timeline Taylor Robertson
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1. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Protestors in the rain
2. 1979 The National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights
3. Activists arrive during the Occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, 1969 (AP Photo/RWK).
4. 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
5. 1970 First Earth Day “Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin was flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a meeting right around the time the spill happened. That huge, 800 square-mile oil slick was out there on the ocean, and he could see it out the plane window. That’s what gave him the impetus to organize Earth Day. He had this idea that we should have a day where, across college campuses, professors do a teach-in where they talk about the environment. I think with the ’69 oil spill, people had this realization that we should protect the environment for the environment’s sake. This concept of environmental rights emerged. UCSB history professor Rod Nash wrote this declaration of environmental rights and it was presented at this conference that was on the one year anniversary of the spill. He then went on to found the first environmental studies program in the U.S.”
6. Kids participate in a print making workshop at Self Help Graphics, 1973.
7. 1975 UFW grape boycott poster
8. 1973 Reverend Troy Perry stands in his burned-down church The church has also endured its share of troubles. MCC has faced anti-LGBTQ violence, particularly during what Perry terms a period of persecution in the 1970s when they lost five churches to arson—including a New Orleans gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge where MCC members were holding a meeting; it was the worst mass murder of LGBTQ persons in the U.S. until the Pulse night club massacre in 2016. According to the MCC History Project, their churches began to experience the full brunt of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s; the Rev. Elder Don Eastman wrote that by the time effective HIV treatments became available in 1996, MCC had lost one-third of its congregants. “I don’t believe that any disease, I don’t care what it is, is a gift from God to a class of people,” Perry said to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1983 during a televised debate. “We don’t want political games played with this issue. We want to make sure that people don’t die.”
9. 1973 Roe v Wade was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court
10. 1977 Apple first computer for mass market and Floppy Disks After the duo invented the Apple I computer, an improved version known as Apple II was already underway. After getting a loan to make more computers, the company eventually took off selling millions of Apple II's well into the 1980s. 1977: The Second Generation: Apple officially became incorporated in January, then publicly released the Apple II in June, which was the first personal computer for the mass market. That same year, Michael Scott became the president of the company. 1978: Floppy Disks: The tech giant took a break from releasing computers and released the Apple Disk II, which was an external floppy-disk drive. The floppy disk was more expensive than what a gaming console costs in 2016. The Apple Disk had an introductory price of $495, but it was then raised to $595
11. In the 1970s, Davis was a fugitive on the FBI's most-wanted list. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California but was later acquitted on all charges. Angela Davis raises her fist to give her power salute as she sits in the courtroom at Marin Civic Center in San Rafael, Ca., on March 16, 1971. Davis, who is accused of supplying some of the weapons used in a shoot-out during an attempted escape of prisoners at the Marin County Courthouse, is waiting for her court hearing to start after it was postponed because of bomb threats. In the fall of 1970, she was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. (AP Photo)
12. 1979-1992 Soviet - Afghan War - Operation Cylcone President Reagan meeting with Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the Oval Office in 1983. Operation Cyclone was the codename for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention
13. 1972 Draft Lottery - Drum
14. 1971 San Fernando Earthquake Damage to Road 2
15. 1975 Christopher Street West Pride Parade The Gay Pride parade on Hollywood Boulevard in 1975. Before Stonewall, the Queer Revolution Started Right Here in Los Angeles. L.A. gays launched the movement (and the battle cry) that shook the world. Founded in 1970 and incorporated in 1976, Christopher Street West Association, Inc. is a nonprofit service organization within the LGBTQ community. The organization was responsible for organizing the world's first LGBTQ pride parade, which took place in Los Angeles. The original intent behind this parade was to celebrate LGBTQ resistance during the 1969 New York Stonewall Riots and to provide an experience in which LGBTQ individuals could feel pride in their identities, see others like themselves in a public setting, and not feel alone. The first pride parade took place on June 28, 1970, with approximately 1,000 people in attendance. Since its beginnings in the early 1970s, the parade now known as LA PRIDE has had a mardi gras-like and carnivalesque quality, presenting political platforms and viewpoints in a fun and celebratory manner. Each year, the parade reflects current social and cultural happenings within the LGBTQ community.
16. 1973 Wounded Knee: Russell Means, right, beats the drum at a meeting of the Wounded Knee occupation Russell Means, right, beats the drum at a meeting of the Wounded Knee occupation on March 10, 1973. A photojournalist who managed to get inside the cordon made a series of images of the stand-off and negotiations. On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, some 200 Sioux Native Americans, led by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupy Wounded Knee, the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. The AIM members, some of them armed, took 11 residents of the historic Oglala Sioux settlement hostage as local authorities and federal agents descended on the reservation. AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had the right to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development. Then, in early 1973, AIM prepared for its dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country’s lowest rates of life expectancy.
17. 1973 Minnie Lee & Mary Alice forcibly sterilized
18. 1976 Harvey Milk on the Campaign Trail 1 Harvey Milk passes out fliers at a San Francisco Safeway grocery store during his 1976 state assembly run. Harvey Milk loved campaigning; that was the real secret of his success. For months out of every year, he would let his business drift into further disarray in order to get up at five in the morning and shake hands at bus stops, to visit people in the neighborhood, to speak at every meeting that he was invited to. He organized a Castro Village business association and the annual Castro Street Fair; he persuaded gay bars across the city to boycott Coors beer in aid of a union campaign. He became a figure in the neighborhood, and, eventually, one who could get things done.
19. 1971 Attica Rebellion: State troopers prepare to retake Attica 2 Armed officers walk by the entrance to the Attica Correctional Facility, in Attica, NY, in the aftermath of the riot at the prison, September 1971. Negotiations were led by a group of journalists, politicians and prison reformers, including the radical civil rights attorney William Kunstler and the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Shuttling between prisoners in the yard and state authorities gathered outside, the negotiators worked heroically toward a settlement. But Rockefeller was uncompromising, and after refusing to go to Attica to join the negotiations himself, he abandoned talks and ordered state troopers to “retake” the prison.
20. 1978 Harvey Milk Elected 1
21. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners with makeshift amor in a hallway
22. 1979 White Night Riots 1
23. 1970 Lavender Menace 2 Rita Mae Brown, in Lavender Menace T-shirt, at the Lavender Menace Action, May 1st, 1970. The term "Lavender Menace" originated as a negative term for the association of lesbianism with the feminist movement, but it was later reclaimed as a positive term by lesbian feminists. The phrase "Lavender Menace" was reportedly first used in 1969 by Betty Friedan, president of The National Organization for Women (NOW), to describe the threat that she believed associations with lesbianism posed to NOW and the emerging women's movement. Friedan, and some other heterosexual feminists, worried that the association would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement.
24. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: LASD officers outside the Silver Dollar Cafe 2
25. 1973 STAR 3 Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in New York City. The term was reclaimed by lesbians within the women’s movement in 1970 who demanded inclusion and recognition. Some staff members from NOW resigned from their jobs to join the group. That same year members of the Lavender Menace disrupted the Second Congress to Unite Women, a conference sponsored by NOW by cutting the lights and changing into shirts with the name “lavender menace” on them, Lesbian rights were included in NOW’s six key issues in 1971 and in 1977, Betty Friedan apologized for her previous remarks and actively supported a resolution against sexual preference discrimination.
26. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: LASD officers outside the Silver Dollar Cafe 3
27. 1978 California Prop 6: Protest Advertisment Advertisement against Proposition 6, an initiative sponsored by State Senator John Briggs to expel gay and lesbian teachers, 1978. The Briggs Initiative galvanized the California LGBTQ+ community, as well as state and national political figures. Harvey Milk, elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors the previous year, was arguably the most vocal and visible opponent of Proposition 6. More surprisingly, Ronald Reagan (then Governor of California) came out against it, as did both former US President Gerald Ford and current President Jimmy Carter. Anita Bryant made frequent appearances in support of Proposition 6 as part of the Save Our Children coalition. The referendum failed by a vote of 58.4% to 41.6%.

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Self Help Graphics and Art Self Help Graphics and Art (SHG) was founded informally in 1970 by Sister Karen Boccalero, a Franciscan nun who began making prints in a garage alongside Chicano artists Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez, Frank Hernández in East Los Angeles. In 1973, SHG moved to Brooklyn Avenue (now Cesar Chavez Avenue) with a grant from the Order of the Sisters of Saint Francis, expanding its space and community access.

Self Help Graphics came out of the Chicano arts movement of the 1970s, which saw an emergence of Chicano artists embracing pre-colonial cultural roots as a means of resistance against erasure, and sought to empower young Chicanos and Latinos to embrace heritage. Since then, SHG has remained a vibrant and vital hub for the Chicano arts scene in East Los Angeles. Over its forty-year history, SHG has produced over forty curated ateliers (print editions) with the help of an in-house master printer. Printmaking is an accessible art form that has continued to serve an important role in political organizing and movements and the works produced at SHG addressing timely political issues are a powerful part of its legacy as an arts organization.

Since the 1980s, Self Help has focused on developing artists within the community and helping them gain exposure in the larger art world. It has been instrumental in the acquisition of Latino and Chicano art by major museums and in increasing exhibitions dedicated to such works. Artists associated with Self Help include members of Los Four, Gronk, Yreina Cervántez, Leo Limón, Linda Vallejo, Michael Amescua, Yolanda M. López, Roberto Delgado, and Alonzo Davis.

The organization has maintained its grassroots commitment to community, extending its activities beyond supporting artists to encompass topics around health and wellness, environmental justice and youth empowerment. From August 1975 to 1985, Self Help conducted a mobile art studio program called the Barrio Mobile Art Studio to bring printmaking, filmmaking, sculpture, etc., to East Los Angeles elementary schools. Self Help has also held an annual Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration since 1972, featuring artist-led workshops and becoming an integral event in East L.A.

Sources:
Decemvirale, J.V. “Self Help Graphics and Art.” Khan Academy, Accessed June 6th 2025. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/post-minimalism/painting/a/self-help-graphics-and-art.
Gunckel, Colin, ed. Self Help Graphics & Art: Art in the Heart of East Los Angeles. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2014.
Self Help Graphics & Art. “Our Story.” Self Help Graphics & Art, Accessed June 5th 2025. https://www.selfhelpgraphics.com/history.