Campesinos

The son of a sculptor, Zúñiga was mostly self-taught, which allowed him to approach various artistic mediums free from academic conventions. His work reflects years of intense study before he made a name for himself among the Mexican avant-garde. In 1973, he worked on his first lithographs in San Francisco, as a contributor to the project "Mexican Masters Suite" (Editions Press), which included works by prominent artists such as Rufino Tamayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros. "Campesinos" shows Zúñiga’s development of the lithographic technique, which by the 1980s included diverse colors and complex compositions of figures in space. Peasants and indigenous subjects are a recurrent theme throughout his work, which condemned the injustices perpetrated against marginalized groups and dignified their work through the sincere and empathetic depiction of everyday scenes. In this print, the absence of a background setting centers attention on the figures, which are compositionally brought together to convey both community bonds and the experience of alienation.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.