Aliens Sans Frontières

Painter, printmaker, and professor at Stanford University, Enrique Chagoya uses his art for activist causes and also uses seemingly cartoonish or naïve imagery as an entryway for discussions of complex cultural and geopolitical issues. After researching his DNA ancestry, Chagoya learned that his ancestors were Native American (Central Mexico), European, Ashkenazi, Middle Eastern/North African, Sub-Saharan African, and East and South Asian. This work, entitled Aliens Sans Frontières (Aliens without borders), includes six self-portraits of the artist, each drawing on a pernicious stereotype of a certain ethnicity. Printed from nine plates of mylar sheets and hand drawn using acrylic paint, pencils, and toned washes, the work is a highly technical, accomplished print—graphic in its geometric patterning, gritty in its evocation of street graffiti, and subversive in its crisscrossing of gender and class lines.