Enrique Chagoya’s latest print is “APPARITION AT THE BORDER OF LANGUAGE”. The artist describes this work as follows:
This print presents a fictitious encounter between contemporary colonial forces and Native Americans who are defenders of immigrant refugees and displaced populations.
A collage of a six-year-old Mayan girl with an Aztec headdress and the body of Capitan America from a 1993 Marvel Comics book represents the early American Nations. In my version she encounters a white supremacist character at the Grand Canyon in a comic book style.
The dominant paradigm ignores the history of immigration that started with the first undocumented settlers. It is a forgotten history about the founding of our country at the expense of Native Americans, African Americans who are descendants of slaves that were forced to come to the country, early Mexicans who lived in the Southwest for centuries before it was part of the U.S. and people from Puerto Rico after its annexation. They did not cross the border; the border crossed them.
From this historic perspective, contemporary hard working undocumented immigrants contribute to our economy and culture and should be welcomed as new Americans.
In 2000, Chagoya became a citizen of the United States. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at Stanford University where he received the Dean’s Award in the Humanities in 1998. In 2013, ARTIUM, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art presented the exhibition Cannibal Palimpsest, Chagoya’s first exhibition in a European museum.
Chagoya’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The LA County Museum, The National Museum of American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Art Gallery and The New York Public Library among others.
