Patrocinadores

| Programa general | Instituto Cultural Cabañas | Exposiciones |

Friday 14
Exhibition Opening

Marcos Raya (México)
Flying blind into the imaginary world of Marcos Raya
Paints, Installation, Mixed Media, Collage, Fotograph

Edward Maldonado, curador

From may 14 de June 30

Marcos Raya

The visual art of Marcos Raya summarizes and anticipates the art of the twenty-first century, a period fraught with significant human displacements and cultural conflict. In order to understand Raya's work, states the Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, one must become an “undocumented cultural subject.” Monsiváis continues: “And anyone who wants to understand artistic works as vast and complex as those of Raya, must realize from the beginning that a contemporary artist needs to be read on the basis of being rooted in mobility.”

Marcos Raya was born in Irapuato, Mexico. He immigrated to Chicago in 1974, where he lived in one of the historic Mexican neighborhoods around Taylor Street, in the Near West Side. As a high school student, he visited a class at the Art Institute of Chicago and was so fascinated by it that he then decided to become a painter.

In 1968, Raya dropped out of the Arts Academy in Lenox, Massachusetts, and became a self-taught artist. Back in Chicago, the military draft awaited him during the Vietnam War years. To avoid serving in the military, Raya returned to Mexico. There he identified with the student movement of 1968.

Two years later, he returned to Chicago and painted his first mural, We Shall Walk through the Ruins of Fascism. In 1971, he moved to Pilsen, a Mexican neighborhood. Conscious of class differences and fueled by his ideology, he became artist-in-residence at Casa Aztlán for ten years. By the mid-1970s, Raya was already considered one of the masters of mural painting in Chicago. Raya considered painting murals as intellectual acts of resistance against the U.S. military aggression evident from the 1960s well into the 1980s. His mural The Fallen Dictator, completed in 1980, is the best example of this stance.

| Programa general | Instituto Cultural Cabañas | Exposiciones |