Enrique Chagoya

Borderlandia explores the world of cultural hybrids and collisions animated in the work of San Francisco artist Enrique Chagoya. Born in Mexico in 1953, Chagoya taps his home country's complex history, international politics, world religions, art history and popular culture in lively paintings, drawings, codices and prints. His varied oeuvre includes social satire and his trademark "reverse anthropology"--the imaginative retelling of various histories from the point of view of the defeated. Chagoya's fantastical narratives combine contemporary icons like Mickey Mouse, Superman, Che Guevara and George W. Bush with ancient figures like the Aztec god Mictlantecutli, Buddha, the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus Christ. This remarkable survey offers a comprehensive presentation of the artist's work from 1983 to 2007, and features bi-lingual--English and Spanish--texts by Jeff Fleming, Patricia Hickson, Daniela Pérez and Robert Storr, alongside a checklist, an artist's chronology and selected exhibition history. Among the 63 color illustrations are several three-panel foldout sheets featuring Chagoya's codices--accordion-folded books on amate (bark) paper drawn from pre-Columbian tradition.