Artist

Enrique Chagoya

born Mexico City, Mexico 1953
A man with a white beard standing in front of a framed one dollar bill

Courtesy McEvoy Foundation. Photo by Henrick Kam, 2019

Born
Mexico City, Mexico
Active in
  • San Francisco, California, United States
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols from ancient to contemporary sources to address the post-colonial clash between Western and non-Western cultures. He works in different media such as painting, drawing, multiples and printmaking.

He studied at Escuela Nacional de Economía at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1971-74), and received degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA’84) and University of California at Berkeley (MA and MFA 1987). He received an Honorary Doctorate degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017. Currently, he is a full professor at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, and has been teaching art practice since 1995. In 2020, he received a Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking Award from the Southern Graphics Council International, and was inducted to the National Academy of Design in New York City.

His work can be found in many public collections including the British Museum, London; Artium Museum, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco; Museo Nacional de la Estampa (MUNAE) and Fundación Televisa Mexico City; and Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) in Oaxaca, among others. He is represented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco; George Adams Gallery, New York; and Lisa Sette Gallery, Phoenix, AZ.

In 2019, Kelly’s Cove Press released his monograph, Aliens.

Exhibitions

Media - 2011.12 - SAAM-2011.12_1 - 77591
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art
October 24, 2013–March 2, 2014
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art presents the rich and varied contributions of Latino artists in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept of a collective Latino identity began to emerge. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s pioneering collection of Latino art. It explores how Latino artists shaped the artistic movements of their day and recalibrated key themes in American art and culture.

Related Books

An artwork of a man with a mustache
¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
Beginning in the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today. Many artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, and channeled the period’s social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States. The exhibition ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now presents, for the first time, historical civil rights-era prints by Chicano artists alongside works by graphic artists working from the 1980s to today.