In the middle of a town hall last month at the Ella Austin Community Center, U.S. Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke pointed to the back of the auditorium, where San Antonio artist Cruz Ortiz was busy silk-screening “Beto por Tejas” T-shirts for audience members.

O’Rourke, a Democratic congressman attempting to unseat Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, praised Ortiz as one of the greatest visual artists in the nation and cited his support as an example of the creative energy O’Rourke’s Senate campaign is generating.

Ortiz and his Snake Hawk Press team took some of that energy to Austin this week, where they screen-printed 150 O’Rourke posters Wednesday afternoon in the parking lot of the Hotel San Jose for the offshoot South by Southwest music festival known as South by San Jose. This spring, Ortiz will take his vintage press on the road with O’Rourke for some general-election barnstorming in the Rio Grande Valley.

Ortiz is that rare artist who can create cutting-edge work with mass appeal. After all, at any given time, you can find his Chicano pop art simultaneously gracing museum walls and Papa John’s pizza boxes.

That talent has turned him into a key player in Texas Democratic politics, lending a patina of hip irreverence this year to the campaigns of O’Rourke, gubernatorial contender Andrew White and U.S. District 23 candidate Gina Ortiz Jones.

It’s easy to see what Ortiz brings to a political campaign: a heady combination of South Side street-level immediacy and artsy agitprop cachet — an instant connection to the Latino community and do-it-yourself punk rockers.

“Cruz has this unique way of using art to reach out to people who haven’t gotten involved in the political process before,” said Desi Canela, the communications director for White’s campaign and a grass-roots worker for O’Rourke.

Canela recalled that the first time she collaborated on an event with Ortiz, for a 2015 pro-Hillary Clinton presidential debate watch party at Alamo Beer Co., “we got 450 people to attend. I’d never seen any of these people in my life.”

Canela said the same dynamic played out a month ago when Ortiz hosted a pro-White event — which fell somewhere between family barbecue and campaign rally — for about 100 people at Ortiz’s South Side Snake Hawk Press studio.

“Artists and politicians, you hardly ever see them mix,” Ortiz said. “But I was raised in a Democratic household, so it just made sense for me.”

Ortiz began blending art and activism about 15 years ago when he silk-screened posters for Patti Radle’s District 5 City Council campaign and he followed up in 2005 by boosting Julián Castro’s first run for mayor.

In 2008, Ortiz gravitated early to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and hosted a party at his home, with local artists invited to create their own prints. For that event, Ortiz asked people to bring their own plain T-shirts and watch while he silk-screened “Obama tiene ganas” on the shirts. The bring-your-own-shirt approach would become one of his calling cards.

“I wanted to do something that would include the Tex-Mex type of vernacular stuff that people would get right away,” Ortiz said. “It was bringing national politics to San Antonio.”

Ortiz helped raise nearly $5,000 for the Obama campaign and, after Obama’s victory, got a thank-you letter from the White House.

Two years ago, Hillary Clinton’s campaign organization tapped Ortiz to create original artwork for Clinton’s presidential campaign. He designed a flag with the word “ganas” under a series of right angles. The designed appeared in animated form on a microsite for the Latinos for Hillary coalition.

That same year, Ortiz and Snake Hawk Press handled the graphic-design work for the Texas Democratic Convention. For Ortiz, the motivation was aesthetic as much as ideological. To his way of thinking, political conventions generally feature boring graphics and he can’t stand to see political activity turned into something dull.

He said his primary purpose is not to endorse individual politicians but to get more people engaged in the voting process.

“I generally see myself as an artist who’s responding to their environment,” Ortiz said. “It’s hard for me to draw pretty pictures when you have crazies like Ted Cruz trying to do something that’s not even what the real people are talking about.

“And these campaigns need better design. Just on that level, I’m really sick of looking at these posters.”