About

[Spanish Version]

I am a multidisciplinary artist working in representational painting, graphite drawing, and printmaking. My practice is built through slow, labor-intensive methods, where time is not a constraint but a material. I construct images through dense crosshatching, layered passages of tone, and patient revision, allowing a figure, a landscape, or an invented emblem to emerge with the clarity of an artifact and the intimacy of a confession.

My formation was shaped by movement between worlds. I was born in Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, and immigrated with my family to Los Angeles in 1975. The shift from rural life to the intensity of the city sharpened my attention to contradiction, the ways identity is negotiated between public expectation and private experience. In 1984, I worked as a muralist through a Long Beach summer youth program connected to the Los Angeles Olympics. It was an early lesson in scale, civic visibility, responsibility, and the power of images to stand in for a community’s voice.

Although my work is not autobiographical, it is informed by the broader Mexican American experience and by the social architecture of masculinity. I return to masculinity as inherited performance, a choreography of pride, silence, and vulnerability learned long before it is questioned. My portraits and symbolic compositions hold that tension rather than resolve it. Roosters, masks, and mythic figures recur as metaphors for bravado and fragility, for what is declared and what is withheld. I am interested in the psychological space between a role and a self, the moment when performance slips and something human surfaces.

Process is central to meaning. I choose mediums that register labor as evidence. Graphite lets me build a surface through accumulation, each line a decision that cannot be rushed. Printmaking extends that discipline into pressure, reversal, and repetition, turning an image into a record of touch and force. These methods preserve the trace of time, and the work asks for sustained looking, not as a luxury, but as a form of respect.

Alongside studio work, I maintain a serious documentation practice through video. In Xicano Chronicles, a multi-year series I executive produce and edit, I record Chicanx artists, writers, curators, and collectors to cultivate dialogue and to catalog voices for posterity. I also founded Atelier Visit in 2008 to document the creative process through filmed conversations in artists’ working spaces, building an archive that treats process as cultural evidence. My broader on-camera work includes producing episodes of Modern Art Blitz with Mat Gleason, extending my commitment to public-facing art discourse. I have also directed and edited oral history projects such as Resurrected Histories: Voices from the Chicano Arts Collectives of Highland Park, connecting interviews, archival material, and place to preserve community memory.

In recent years, I have expanded this inquiry through Xicanoland, a speculative alternate history that fuses Mesoamerican legacy with futurism. Where the archive erases, I invent. I build imagined presidents, scientists, and poets, each paired with a Xoloitzcuintle spirit guide, and I map a world in which Indigenous knowledge and cultural resilience become engines of survival and advancement. This is not escapism. It is a method of repair that restores complexity to histories that have been flattened, and it proposes futures rooted in dignity rather than erasure.

Across all bodies of work, my commitment is to craft as a form of honesty. My work appears in collections and public commissions, including LA Metro, reflecting a civic and museum presence. In an era of fast images and narratives, I insist on slow looking and on the physical proof of labor that remains in the surface. Ultimately, I make work to hold complexity without simplifying it, images that operate as documents and as myths, as intimate studies and as cultural propositions.