Laura Stellacci / Boccalero
"If you pray more than 15 minutes a day,” she would say, “there’s probably something wrong with you. If you have your deity in your heart, there’s no reason to beg.
Written and recorded during her stay at the Villa Aurora in 2024, Laura Stellacci’s radio piece is an audio-notebook, of sorts, compiled while researching a part of East Los Angeles’ local history. It is an evocation of the figure of an unconventional Franciscan nun, Sister Karen Boccalero(1933-1997), and the mark she left on Self-Help Graphics and Art, the experimental printmaking center that she co-founded with the queer Mexican artists Carlos Bueno and Antonio Ibañez in Boyle Heights. Her fictional stream of consciousness revisits several moments in time, like the brief period when SHG hosted a punk club in its basement: the Vex would become an important musical incubator for Chicano and Latin/x punk bands in the 1980s. The organisation continues to be an important cultural center for Chicano Art today, encouraging and supporting aspiring artists.
Written and recorded during her stay at the Villa Aurora in 2024, Laura Stellacci’s radio piece is an audio-notebook, of sorts, compiled while researching a part of East Los Angeles’ local history. It is an evocation of the figure of an unconventional Franciscan nun, Sister Karen Boccalero(1933-1997), and the mark she left on Self-Help Graphics and Art, the experimental printmaking center that she co-founded with the queer Mexican artists Carlos Bueno and Antonio Ibañez in Boyle Heights. Her fictional stream of consciousness revisits several moments in time, like the brief period when SHG hosted a punk club in its basement: the Vex would become an important musical incubator for Chicano and Latin/x punk bands in the 1980s. The organisation continues to be an important cultural center for Chicano Art today, encouraging and supporting aspiring artists.
Listen to “Boccalero”