Enrique Chagoya
1953–
Enrique Chagoya’s prints, drawings, collages, and multiples offer critical commentary on the global reach of the United States and its cultural, political, and historical tensions with Latin America. Deconstructing typologies of both the indigenous and modern cultures of the Americas, Chagoya’s work draws on a wide range of source material—religious iconography, comic books, sports mascots, folklore, racial stereotypes, Western art history, and societal artifacts.
The artist has lived and worked in both Mexico and the United States: in the mid-1970s he studied economics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and became a social activist while working on rural redevelopment projects and drawing cartoons for union and student newspapers; in 1979 he became a permanent resident of the United States and began freelancing as an illustrator and designer before earning degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute and University of California, Berkeley. In the late 1980s Chagoya was artistic director of Galería de la Raza, an important venue for Chicano and Latino art in San Francisco.
Building upon these political and cultural legacies and his own life experiences, Chagoya’s imagery became increasingly reflective of the economic and social realities of the 1990s. Thesis/Antithesis explores the dialectics of border relationships, presenting what is perhaps a biting metaphor for the stampede of “big business,” represented here by a black wing-tipped shoe, over humanistic concerns, suggested by the bare, burnt-umber foot, or for the colonialist triumph of the modern, industrialized world over a primitive, ancestral past.
Introduction
Enrique Chagoya (born 1953) is a Mexican-born American painter, printmaker, and educator. The subject of his artwork is the changing nature of culture. He frequently uses shocking imagery, irony, and Mesoamerican icons to convey his point in his artwork. Chagoya teaches at Stanford University in the department of Art and Art History. He lives in San Francisco.
Wikidata identifier
Q1343964
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 13, 2025.
Introduction
Chagoya uses a variety of images derived from pop culture, pre-Colombian art, and Western art history to address the subject of colonialism in the U.S. and Latin America. He attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, studying political economy and contributing political cartoons to union newsletters there. Chagoya later moved to Berkeley, California, working as an illustrator and graphic designer, eventually attending the San Francisco Art Institute, earning a BFA in printmaking in 1984. He received an MA and MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1987. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Country of birth
Mexico
Roles
Artist, aquatinter, etcher, painter, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500299814
Names
Enrique Chagoya
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 13, 2025.
