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
Biography

Born in Mexico City, Enrique Chagoya was partly raised by an Indian nurse who helped him to respect the indigenous people of his country and their history. He earned a bachelor?s degree in economics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico in Mexico City in 1975. As a student, he was sent to work on rural development projects, an experience that strengthened his interest in political and social activism. In 1977 Chagoya and his wife immigrated to the United States, where he worked as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, and for a time in 1977 with farm laborers in Texas. In 1984 he earned a B.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.A. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. In 1987 he was awarded an M.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to solo exhibitions in California and Oaxaca, Mexico, Chagoya's work has been included in many group exhibitions. He has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts and in 1995 won a Monet fellowship. He currently lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University.

Joann Moser Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1997)

Exhibitions

Media - 2011.12 - SAAM-2011.12_1 - 77591
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art
October 25, 2013March 2, 2014
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.

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.