ENRIQUE CHAGOYA

Born 1953 in Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in San Francisco, USA.

Enrique Chagoya, The Enlightened Savage's Guide to Economic Theory, 2010 (detail), acrylic, water based oil, photo transfers and decals on hand made Amate paper, approximately 30.5 x 259 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale

Enrique Chagoya originally studied economics and worked on rural development projects, helping to organise farm workers in Mexico and Texas. After further study in California, he became the director of Galeria de la Raza – the most significant venue for Chicano art in San Francisco. He is best known for his paintings, pastels, prints, charcoal drawings and mixed-media books.

Chagoya draws from a range of sources and subjects to consider the complexities of Mexico’s past and current international status, the inequities of world politics, and the symbolic power of religion, modern art and mass-media culture. He blends images and styles – often in the same work – from contemporary media, Mexican folk art, religious icons and modernism. Some works have been made in the format of pre-Colombian Mayan codices.

Chagoya’s core subject is the changing nature of culture. His history of living across two distinct yet proximate nations – Mexico and the United States – has informed his practice in a profound way. He speaks of his work as a conceptual fusion of opposing cultural realities he has experienced in his lifetime. This has led to a strong interest in the social conditions surrounding the production of art. The title of a 2010 work might serve as a catch-all description of his ironic, historically charged work: Illegal Alien’s Guide to Political Theory. So, too, might the name of a recent exhibition – ‘Don’t follow me, I am lost too’ (2008). Chagoya’s work attacks headon the dislocation of global experience in a highly mediated and hypocritical world with overlapping cultures and precarious ideologies. Drawing on a wide lexicon of ideas, beliefs and myths in currency across the Americas, he pokes fun at ‘artspeak’, anthropology, statesmanship, politics and branding, among many other sacred cows. Chagoya’s works have a biting, satirical edge, borrowing from comics and editorial cartoons to undermine or mutate figures from pre-Colombian mythology, nineteenth-century literature, international politics and American television. Juxtapositions and re-castings are at the core of his practice: Superman, Aztec gods, Mickey Mouse, Elvis and Pablo Picasso are all remixed into new and politically charged scenarios. He calls this process ‘reverse anthropology’, as he aims to reverse, or at least subvert, the domineering and pervasive influence of western (principally American) popular art, belief and culture in the developing world. By re-imagining the icons of the West through indigenous and colonial perspectives, Chagoya’s work situates itself at a border of two worlds, much like Mexico itself. This uncertain position allows the artist to create ambivalent and provocative images that present an acute and darkly comic critique of continuing colonial experience as well as the hypocrisies of the hegemonic West.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Don’t Follow Me, I Am Lost Too’, Lisa Sette Gallery, Arizona, USA
2009 ‘Adventures and Misadventures: Prints and Multiples 2002–2008’, George Adams Gallery, New York, USA
2008 ‘Illegal Alien’s Guide to Critical Theory’, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, USA
2008 ‘Retrospective’, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California, USA
2008 ‘Borderlandia’, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, USA (travelling exhibition)

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Shark Ink Prints Revisited’, MOCA Denver, Colorado, USA
2007 ‘7+7+7=21’, Lisa Sette Gallery, Arizona, USA
2006 ‘135th Anniversary Exhibition’, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, USA
2005 ‘Drawings from the Modern’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
2004 ‘Misleading Trails’, China Art Archives, Beijing, China

Selected Bibliography

Patricia Hickson (ed.), Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia, exhibition catalogue, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, 2007
Ken Johnson, ‘For a Broad Landscape an Equally Wide Survey’, New York Times, Art Review, 31 May 2006
Jordan Kantor, ‘Enrique Chagoya’, Artforum, May 2008, p. 375
Cathy Lebowitz, ‘Political Art in Election Season’, Art in America, October 2004
Peter Selz, Art of Engagement/ Visual Politics in California and Beyond, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005