Enrique Chagoya

Biography Enrique Chagoya was born in Mexico City in 1953. His father, who worked at the Banco de México, taught young Chagoya how to draw. He was instrumental in Chagoya's pursuit of art.

On June 10, 1971, when Chagoya was in high school, he took part in a student demonstration for rights and reform. A paramilitary group known as Los Halcones (hawks) beat the demonstrators with sticks, shot them, and attacked them with knives, ultimately killing over 120 students, including the wounded in their hospital beds. This violent response became known as the Corpus Christi Massacre. Chagoya barely escaped by leaping over a shop's closing gate. Chagoya says this experience taught him “how dangerous it could be to have a critical mind and how deadly it could be to use my freedom to demonstrate and to use my freedom of expression — rights granted in the Mexican Constitution.”

In 1977, Chagoya and his first wife Jeanine Kramer visited McAllen, Texas. As of 2016, he was a full time professor in the department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

Appropriation is a central component of Chagoya's artistic practice. It has been argued that "In our wired era of ubiquitous information and perpetual image bombardment, all of human history, cultural production included, is online and available for plunder: to sample, remix, recycle and repurpose." In this context, Chagoya has been singled out as "a rare artist who can exploit this vast archive to make distinctive works that speak eloquently to our contemporary condition."

Large Scale Pastel Series Chagoya was one of the 1,000 artists that joined in the “Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America” in 1984 in New York, which commemorated a massacre in El Salvador in 1932. Chagoya, who had been an abstract artist in Mexico, considered his large pastel Their Freedom of Expression. The Recovery of Their Economy a political statement rather than an artwork, but it served as the starting point of his career as a political artist.

Tribute to Posada, made for a Day of the Dead exhibition in 1989, honors one of Mexico's famous popular artists, who is also a favorite of the artist. Chagoya's small skeletal self-portrait is dwarfed by a monumental one. Both have red eyes.

Another large painting from 1994, called Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language, an image based on a print of a cannibal barbecue by Theodore de Bry, depicts Gov. Wilson three times. It is part of a ten-artist exhibit called "The Legend of Bud Shark and His Indelible Ink," featuring artists for which he served as printer. When it was on display in the Loveland Museum, a city-run art museum in Loveland, Colorado, it (one of a limited edition of 30 lithographs), was the subject of protests. According to the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), some city council members, as well as religious groups and individuals hoped to have Chagoya's artwork removed. The NCAC defended the work's exhibition on First Amendment grounds. According to the artist the work is a commentary on the Catholic sex abuse cases. The woman went to court on October 15, 2010. The vandalized artwork was not replaced, to the artist's regret. thumb 'Liberty Club in the Sky', (2005) hard ground and spit bite aquatint and etching with drypoint by ChagoyaAnother controversial artwork includes "The Enlightened Savage Guide to Economic Theory" (2009–10). This artwork includes imagery of murdered children, suspended from meat hooks, in a scene reminiscent of a butcher shop. In addition, this work includes two monstrous figures fighting, one with the head of George Washington and the other with the head of Saddam Hussein, referencing Middle Eastern conflicts over oil.

Prints Chagoya's two favorite printmakers are the Spaniard Francisco Goya and the Mexican José Guadalupe Posada. He describes them as the originators of modernism. Though their lives did not overlap, he brought them together in a print called Goya Meets Posada (Goya conoce a Posada). The artists are shaking hands, accompanied by imagery from two of their most famous prints. The character known as Catrina, originated by Posada, stands between them, while bulls fall from the sky (a reference to a Goya print known as the "Rain of Bulls"). Chagoya depicts himself as child skating by, in the lover right of the image.

Paintings Chagoya's 5-foot-by-7-foot painting of Jesus, a resurrected figure floating in a white robe that holds a banner with a single word: "love," was gifted by the artist to the Resurrection Fellowship in Loveland, Colorado in 2011. According to Chagoya, the painting was received by the congregation with a standing ovation.

Chagoya’s Bathroom Painting of 2018 depicts President Donald Trump in a surreal manner that has been described as "a monstrous Salvador Dalí-like hemorrhoid head (replete with pustules and varicose veins) emerging from a knobby buttock-neck." The larger than life Mayan mask dominates the focal point of the piece, leading to a sense of dominance by indigenous culture over the painting. This painting depicts three Native Americans, who are in the process of abducting a feminine Donald Duck character. Donald Duck likely serves as an allusion to former President Donald Trump. The Native Americans are in a canoe named "Border Patrol". This is an inversion of the traditional understanding of Border Patrol and immigration, and creates a political statement.

He is the recipient of a Tiffany Fellowship.

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