Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, printmaking, drawing, artist books
Website: georgeadamsgallery.com/artists/enrique-chagoya
Enrique Chagoya was born in 1953 in Mexico City, where he studied political economy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and drew political cartoons for union and student newspapers. He moved to Berkeley, California in 1979, working as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer before redirecting his energies to fine art. He received his BFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1984 and his MA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. He has lived in San Francisco since 1995. In the late 1980s he served as artistic director of Galería de la Raza, an important venue for Chicano and Latino art in San Francisco’s Mission District. He has been a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University since 1994, and became a US citizen in 2000. In 2021 he was inducted into the National Academy of Design.
He is represented by George Adams Gallery in New York and Anglim/Trimble in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMOMA, LACMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the de Young Museum, and the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, among others. His awards include the Academy Award for Visual Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1997) and an Artadia Foundation Grant (2005).
Chagoya works in painting, printmaking, drawing, and artist books, deploying the visual languages of pop culture, Mesoamerican codices, Western art history, comic books, sports mascots, and religious iconography in collision. His practice is rooted in what he calls “reverse anthropology”: using familiar, friendly imagery — cartoon characters, superhero icons, religious symbols — as Trojan horses for examining colonialism, cultural imperialism, and the ongoing clash between dominant and marginalized cultures. He frequently paints and prints on amate, a traditional bark paper made by Otomi Indigenous papermakers in Puebla, Mexico, and formats his artist books as accordion-fold codices in the tradition of Mayan, Mixtec-Zapotec, and Aztec books — formally reclaiming the structures that Spanish colonizers burned. The result is work that is simultaneously cartoonish, erudite, and politically acute, described by Artforum as operating at the “borders of the spirit.”
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