By: Dani Nalangan

Cynthia Navarro (she/her) draws the stories less told.

I first got to know Cynthia sitting in the Self Help Graphics & Art office one day, having a conversation with some of our coworkers. She gushed about her love for baking, her fridge full of milk, and we bonded over some of the strange snacks that grandparents would give us to eat as kids (have you ever eaten raw sugarcane stalks?). By the watercooler, I found that she was just as colorful and fun as the stickers covering her water bottle that we chatted about.

Navarro, SHG’s  Art Services Manager, illustrator, and small business-owner moved from the South Bay to Watts in the year 2000, growing up not only inspired by the stories from her comics and cartoons, but also her diverse neighbors. Despite the underfunded arts programs in the local schools, she taught herself art; illustrating fantasy worlds from her culture, heroes of color, and telling stories unrepresented in the media she grew up with. Encouraged by supportive teachers, she pursued this passion in college, graduating from California College of the Arts with a degree in illustration. 

She continued to speak more about her work and journey in a meeting we later had on Google Meet. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: I'm interested in the kinds of things that you liked growing up. I know, yesterday, you mentioned having a store and everything. So how did you get into art? What inspired you growing up, and what were some of your interests going into school?

A: I got into art maybe like in middle school. A lot of the schools here in my area are very underfunded, so a lot of the art that I was looking at was like comic books and manga in those cartoon styles. I got into drawing those on my own and I sort of taught myself how to do basic drawings in middle school with books and YouTube, and just asking other artists for advice, if I ever, you know, got to see one. When I got into high school, it was the same—we didn't have an art program there. I had an English teacher who was into writing comics, so he knew a lot of artists and he would refer me to a lot of his friends. I started to take art seriously when I was probably in the 10th grade, and my teacher encouraged me to look into maybe a career path in the arts. As I went through high school, I kind of started looking into high school college programs. I did a program at UCLA—the summer sessions—and then in my senior year, I took some drawing classes at ArtCenter on the weekends. And that's probably the closest I got to a formal art education before college. That kind of helped me build a portfolio.  

I really, really like telling stories with my art. All of my illustrations—I try to build a world, and I tried to add details that the viewer can appreciate. I love to tell stories of people of color and their adventures. I grew up reading and watching all the Harry Potter movies and Lord of the Rings, so I'm really into fantasy or fiction. But you know, you rarely see any of that in the mainstream, at least back then, that included people of color as the main characters. So I would draw my own characters that looked like me, and they would go on their adventures. 

Once it was time to apply to college, I decided to apply to an art school and major in illustration. I ended up going to California College of the Arts in the Bay Area, and I did my bachelor in illustration. I learned a lot of really cool stuff, and after graduating I wanted to give back to the kids that maybe went through what I went through and didn't have art classes. I started to work in after school programming at my old high school. From there, I took a summer class at Self Help for their youth programming, and that's how I met Dewey and Marvella. Marvella invited me on the team, so that's how I got to Self Help. In between just working at Self Help, and after school, I ended up working at ArtworxLA, which is another nonprofit that works with high school students. After working with them, which was this last school year, I heard about the position at Self Help, and I ended up where I am right now.

Q: I also read a lot of comics and manga growing up, and that's also how I got into illustration! I noticed the Naruto and Totoro stickers on your water bottle, and I thought that was really cool.

A: [ Cynthia laughs] Those are all my favorites. I really wanted to do something where I could, like, build a visual setting the way that those stories did, because it was always so fantastical and it takes you into another mindset. It's very believable because there are so many beautiful details in those types of artwork. 

For my small business, when we were in quarantine, like everyone else, I was like, “I need to do something with myself.” I've been doing a lot of work in education, and I always had that impostor syndrome and I still do, where sometimes I feel like maybe I'm a fraud or think, do I really deserve to be where I am as an artist? And when I had a lot of time with myself I thought like, you know, if I don't do it now I'm never gonna do it, I just need to put myself out there. I decided to buy a little Cricut machine and I turned a lot of my drawings into stickers and then some of my artwork into prints. And now I do pop-ups here and there like every other month, and now my inventory is bigger: I have tote bags and pencil pouches, and I just put in an order for my first washi tape. So you know, it's slowly building. 

I like to do that sort of stuff because I believe that art should be accessible to everyone, no matter how rich or poor. Because a lot of times, you know, we have our fine art shows and the cheapest piece might be like $100, but not everyone can afford that. Some people are critics of pop-up artists because we're “devaluing our own work,” but I don't believe in that. I think that it adds a different sort of value to what we do, because someone—a common person—can have a piece of your artwork with them in whatever form that takes. Not just as a print or an original painting, but maybe it's just as simple as a sticker on a water bottle.

Q: Referring back to what you were saying earlier about—being an illustrator yourself—creating stories about people of color because there weren’t a lot, do you have any particular works that you did or inspired you with this in mind? Can you talk about that?

A: Work that really inspired me to kind of do what I do now is probably the Hayao Miyazaki movies because they're still considered anime, but I feel like they're a different type of art form that I think has reached broader audiences outside of the niche because I guess the stories are really accessible to everyone. Sometimes it's hard for other audiences to kind of buy into something if they don't feel like they're getting anything in particular in return; for example, like Miss Marvel. Miss Marvel centers a Pakistani, Muslim, young girl, and it hasn't gotten the same amount of views as, you know, the regular Miss Marvel because there's audiences that feel like if they don't see themselves in something specifically, they don't need to buy into it. But I think that Miyazaki does a great job of setting his stories in fictional worlds where there are still people of color that exist, but they're interacting in not a place like grounded in reality. 

In some of my works I like to ground them more in reality because I want to be more intentional about the race and the origins of my characters. In college, I had my thesis and I had to do ten illustrations that could be related to each other. I did one that I think was really like an “a-ha!” moment for me because I brought together all of the technical skills that I learned that I didn't know that I had into the work. I always felt like when I was in critiques or in my classes, sometimes no one really had a lot to say about it because again, they couldn't buy into it. I guess they didn't want to speak on something that they weren't in-the-know of. But I guess with this one, because it looks so fantastical, people were more responsive. I'm gonna share my screen so that you can see the illustration.

Q: Oh wow!

A: This is one of my thesis pieces. This is a character that I came up with while I was still in school, and he's supposed to be like a Mexican revolutionary who hunts ghosts. There's this one and then there was this one that was an accompanying image. 

So these are like examples of the type of work that really inspired me to do the illustration work that I do. It just felt different. I've done other illustrations like some watercolor paintings, to add a lot of like context, creating an environment and a world. This is kind of the type of work that I like to do. There's a couple of works I did for Self Help. But again, I like to tell stories. I like to tell stories about history. My parents are from Mexico, so all of my work is inspired by my upbringing and just the stories and the things that I've seen when I visited Mexico or, as I grew up, the imagery that I was looking at. But yeah, that's a little bit of my work.

Q: That's super cool. I guess for me, because my parents are from the Philippines and I was born in America, I'm actually just recently starting to get into my culture. There's so much rich, fantastical indigenous beliefs. I feel like that's a story that needs to be told, and that's not really seen in traditional media.

A: Yeah, exactly. That's where we bring in new people into the art form. Like, you know, maybe there might be someone who wasn't interested in looking at art because they didn't see anything that resembled them, and they didn't feel appreciated or seen. But then if they see something that any artist creates that kind of validates their experience and their upbringing and their culture and their language, people feel a lot more self-empowered. And I think that’s why I love doing this type of stuff. Because, you know, I'll see people and then some of them actually tell me, “Oh my God, this is so cute, I've never seen anything like this.” They're really, really happy to see themselves in something else.

Q: Going back, I know you talked about being into art since middle school and pursuing it further in high school and after high school, but I was wondering if your journey to pursuing a career in the arts was that linear? I'm interested if there were other considerations you might have had or any struggles you might have encountered, because I know being in art is kind of difficult.

A: When I was in middle school, I kind of thought I wanted to go into the sciences because I've always always been an animal lover. I wanted to do something in relation with animals and biology or marine biology. But as time went on, and I actually started to experiment with drawing, it felt more natural to me. Sometimes you take your science or your math or your regular general education classes in school, and there are moments where you're like Oh, I hate this section of this subject. For me. I was like, it doesn't feel like 100% there, it feels like maybe it's 70 or 80%. With art, it felt like 100% or more, like I can definitely buy into this, this is something that I love to do. It's fun. It doesn't feel like work. I'm passionate about it, I love to look at it, I want to create my own. And when I got to high school, I feel like I had the right teachers who were very supportive. People are normally like, “Oh, the poor artist” or “You choose the life of an artist? That's so lame.” It was more from my classmates because, again, we all grew up in an area that never offered us art, so no one had a point of reference for it other than the artsy kids like me that just did it on their own because they liked it. So, I never paid any mind to people my own age, I listened to the adults that encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing. 

When I took the classes—that summer class at UCLA—I think it was in the 10th grade. It was that same year that I kind of decided that that was for me. I had a moment where I felt like maybe it wasn't for me, just because I was self taught. My skill level wasn't at the level of the other kids that I encountered, who had probably been drawing since they were like, you know, in elementary school. I compared myself lots and then I was like, Dang, I'm not good. Should I even keep doing this? I don't know. But again, I had a really good support system, including my sister. I have an older sister who's four years older than me, and she always kind of was my voice of reason. Like all artists, we tend to be hard on ourselves, but if we hear it from another perspective, it changes our point of view. She always encouraged me to keep going, and so did my teachers, so I kept going. When I got to college, I still had a lot of moments like that, because I felt like I was playing catch up. But again, I had really great professors who were practicing illustrators, and their experiences validated why I wanted to do what I do now. That's because they were full-time illustrators who made a complete living off of their art. 

The myth of the starving artist isn't real, because we can definitely successfully live off of our art if we take certain approaches. There's art everywhere, there's art in textbooks, there's art in posters, people use art for campaigns, public initiatives, books, movies. Everywhere, everything and anything requires some sort of artist, so there's room for everyone. Just seeing the homes that my professors lived in, when they would invite us for the end-of-the-semester get-togethers, it was solid, visual proof that this is possible. It just really depends on what direction you want to go in. For those of us who decide to do education and our practice, obviously, the path looks a little bit different. But it just really depends on what we want to do and what we're passionate about and what we're willing to do.

Q: So going into Self Help Graphics then—with you being an artist and also working here—I'm interested in what you like about working at Self Help, and if you have any favorite memories or experiences that have contributed to that?

A: Well, I really like working at Self Help because part of the mission of Self Help is to support living artists. A lot of the time there are other institutions who want to preserve the history of the great masters or the people who are long gone. But at Self Help, we work to support artists who are still here, who are still doing the work, who are doing new and creative things in their field. I think that that's a really beautiful thing because there aren't many organizations that do that.

For me, I joined Self Help in the position that I'm in now because I wanted to give back to my community and do it in a different way. I initially was working as a teaching artist and I work directly with the community, but in my vision of my career path, I've always also wanted to have a greater influence or more of a hand in how things are planned or how connections are made. So in my position, I connect a lot with artists that we have here on our team, and I also connect with the partners that we have in the community, and I bring those two parts together. So I'm kind of like the middleman or the bridge that makes these partnerships possible. I am also an advocate for artists, whether it be for internal things, or for external projects. I've had experience as a teaching artist, and it's my job to speak for our artists, so I really do like that about my job. I also like broadening the horizons of the people who seek us, because sometimes we have partners who aren't quite sure what kind of programming they want to offer to their community, or they're seeking guidance to see what kind of programming we can bring to the table, and I'm there to kind of help orient them on like, “this is the type of work that Self Help does, this is what we can offer you.” I offer recommendations, and then we work together to kind of make something happen. 

In terms of memories, I think for me, it was the first time I went to Self Help, which was for S.O.Y. Artista to do the youth programming. I remember I learned about Self Help when I was in college and I took a Chicano art class. It was the first class of its kind, so I was already really excited. When we started to learn about the movement and the different organizations that had a hand in propelling those artists forward, Self Help was a part of that conversation. That's how I ended up going to the summer program. When I came back and it kind of came back into the “know” of my mind, I was like, Hey, I totally forgot that Self Help was something that I wanted to check out when I got back. So, I took the summer class, and learning from Dewey and working with other youth from LA in that class felt so warm and welcoming, because sometimes in other art spaces it feels really eurocentric, very technical, like you have to be a Michelangelo or a DaVinci, it has to be this certain type of art. But at Self Help, it was more about a creative process. Because screen printing is a very accessible medium. It's not a medium where it's associated with a certain look, you can get as simple or as detailed as you want. That for me was a really nice, positive experience, and that's what kind of propelled me to be more involved in the organization.

Q: Last question. Working at SHG, or in your career path as an artist and working with these educational initiatives, in the future do you have any goals or anything you'd like to accomplish?

I want to kind of build upon the foundation that Self Help already has. I know that we offer a lot of great programming, but I also want to expand the programming that we offer not only just internally, but with the people that we work with externally, so helping us reach other corners of the city and make our work more well known. We already have a name for ourselves, but we can only go up from here, right? I'm really excited to work with everyone and help build each other up and build the organization up, especially now that there's that cusp of a new horizon with the new building. It's like, there's so many more possibilities waiting to happen. As we put that work in towards that day, I'm just really excited to see what kind of collaborations and partnerships come out of the different small changes and initiatives that we all have as a team.

Dani Nalangan is the summer/fall Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, Journalism and PR Intern, at Self Help Graphics & Art. She is a musician and illustrator and an undergraduate student at UCLA, studying Musicology and Communications.