San Diego Mesa College*
Art Gallery {welcome!

October 9- November 6, 2008

Reception: Thursday, October 9, 4:30 - 7:00 pm in the Art Gallery, D101, and the Gallery Courtyard

Art Lecture following reception at 7:00 pm in G101

View the artist’s work at www.malaquiasmontoya.com

Artist Malaquias Montoya is a leading figure in the West Coast political Chicano graphics art movement; he creates socially conscious art in the form of paintings and mass-produced silk-screened posters. Following in this tradition of art as protest, Montoya has created a series of twenty-three works that explore and condemn the death penalty and the policies of America’s penal institutions. Montoya states: "We have perfected the art of institutional killings to the degree that it has deadened our national, quintessentially human, response to death. I want to produce a body of work depicting the horror of this act."

This project was conceived during the presidential election of 2000; President George W. Bush was then governor of Texas and the media focused its attention on the state’s capital punishment practices. Montoya continued to ponder on this issue while working on a poster design for the Mumia 911 day. These experiences inspired him to express his opinions and objection to the death penalty. Montoya asks: "Why do we kill, what happens to our humanity and to us, as a culture?"

Montoya’s powerful images are rooted in the tradition of the Taller de Grafica Popular, a group of Mexican printmakers that worked during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, when Mexico was forging its national identity following the Mexican Revolution. Like the Mexican muralists, the artists of the Taller, used their art to express the need for social and political reform for the Mexican underprivileged. In some instances, Montoya combines his expressive vision with text to better communicate his message.

The exhibition Premeditated, has toured from coast to coast in places such as the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago. In 2009 the work will travel to Duke University, North Carolina, and the Oakland Museum of Art. A catalog of the exhibit is available.

Malaquias Montoya was raised in the San Joaquin Valley, California, in a family of seven children with parents that couldn’t read or write. Encouraged by his mother, Montoya continued his education and graduated with honors from UC Berkeley where he taught for several years. Montoya was one of the founders of the "social serigraphy" movement in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1960s. He was the director of the Taller de Artes Graficas in Oakland where he produced various prints and conducted community art workshops.

For twelve years, Montoya was a professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts and for five years chaired the Ethnic Studies Department. He was on the faculty at UC Davis since 1989, where he taught in ?Chicana/o Studies and Art. Currently, a Professor Emeritus, Montoya travels with his work, guest lectures at various colleges throughout the United States where he continues his teaching on a part time basis.