Self Help Graphics & Art and Hecho a Mano Gallery Present Defiant Joy, a New Limited Edition Serigraph by Benjamin Muñoz
Benjamin Muñoz joins the historic legacy of artists published through Self Help Graphics & Art with the release of a new six-color screen print celebrating resilience, cultural pride, and joy as an act of resistance.
Self Help Graphics & Art, with Hecho a Mano Gallery, is proud to announce the release of Defiant Joy, a new limited-edition screen print by Texas-based artist Benjamin Muñoz. Produced at Self Help Graphics & Art’s legendary East Los Angeles print studio, the work continues the institution’s decades-long tradition of publishing Chicano artists whose work reflects the social, political, and cultural realities shaping their communities.
For more than fifty years, Self Help Graphics & Art has stood as one of the most significant institutions in the history of Chicano art, serving as a cultural cornerstone where printmaking has long functioned as both artistic practice and political instrument. Through generations of artists, the organization has helped shape visual language around labor rights activism, immigrant justice movements, and the evolving pulse of Chicano culture in the United States.
With Defiant Joy, Muñoz enters this historic lineage with a work deeply rooted in both celebration and resistance.
Benjamin Muñoz working on the screen print “Defiant Joy” at Self Help Graphics & Art’s Professional Printmaking Program with Dewey Tafoya, SHG’s Lead Printer, and Gabby Claro, SHG’s Studio Assistant.
The six-layer screen print serves as a love letter to Chicano culture and to the communities that continue to cultivate joy, togetherness, and celebration despite systems designed to marginalize them. The work reflects on the resilience required to maintain cultural identity while navigating economic hardship, displacement, generational sacrifice, and the difficult realities of adapting to environments that are often openly hostile toward immigrant communities.
Created during a moment marked by renewed immigration enforcement, ongoing ICE raids, and increasingly aggressive rhetoric surrounding race and belonging in America, Defiant Joy centers a simple but urgent proposition: that community and joy itself can be an act of defiance.
In communities that have historically endured oppression, the act of gathering, celebrating culture, caring for family, and continuing traditions becomes more than survival; it becomes resistance.
This release represents a meaningful moment in Muñoz’s practice, marking his first published edition with Self Help Graphics, an institution whose legacy has profoundly shaped the landscape of contemporary Chicano art for generations.
Defiant Joy will be released as a limited edition screen print published by Self Help Graphics and made available through SHG and Hecho a Mano Gallery.
Benjamin Muñoz, Defiant Joy, 2026
Serigraph, Edition of 60
Image Size: 19.5 in x 25.5 in, Paper Size: 22 in x 30 in
Printed at Self Help Graphics & Art’s Professional Printmaking Program
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Benjamin Muñoz is a Dallas-based multidisciplinary artist known for his monumental relief woodcuts, paintings, and installations exploring themes of labor, identity, family history, and the complexities of contemporary American life through a distinctly Chicano lens. His work is held in numerous public collections across the United States, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, El Museo del Barrio, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Library of Congress. His practice often examines the intersections of culture, resilience, community, and belonging.
https://www.benjaminmunoz.com/
ABOUT HECHO A MANO
Hecho a Mano is based in Santa Fe, NM and focuses on art at the intersection of imagination, innovation and tradition and works primarily with artists based in New Mexico & Mexico. Hecho’s goal is to create deep roots of support for artists and exhibit art that is both accessible and genre-defying. We have a particular interest in printmaking.
One of our goals is to showcase work that exists at both ends of the spectrum of price, functionality, and that of “folk” vs “fine” art. We believe the value of art lies not in price, function, established acceptance, or academic context. Value in artwork is inherent as art-making is inherently human. The gates that are constructed to make art seem inaccessible and exclusive are unnecessary, and we discard them.