Gilbert Luján

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Cruising Turtle Island, 1986
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Cruising Turtle Island, 1986

Gilbert "Magú" Luján (b. 1940) is a well known and influential Chicano sculptor, muralist and painter. He is a founding member of the famous Chicano Art collective Los Four along with Carlos Almaraz, Beto de la Rocha (Father of former Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha) , and Frank Romero.

Luján was born in French Camp, California, near Stockton, to parents of Mexican and indigenous ancestry, notably Tarascan and Apache. After spending his infancy in a camp for migrant workers, his family relocated to East Los Angeles, California, where he spent his childhood and adolescence.

After serving in the Air Force, Luján returned to his community in 1962 and began to attend college, first at East Los Angeles College, then to California State University, Long Beach, where he earned a B.A. in Ceramics and then to University of California, Irvine, where he earned an M.F.A. in Sculpture in 1971. East L.A. was a hotbed of cultural activity, as the Chicano Movement took hold of the U.S. Southwest. At this time Luján began to organize artists' conferences to establish Chicano Art as a valid form of artistic axpression. He met with three other like-minded Chicano artists and formed Los Four in the 1973. In 1974, Los Four had their first exhibition at UC Irvine. This was quickly followed by several other exhibitions on the west coast. Los Four did for Chicano visual art what ASCO did for Chicano performance art; that is, it helped establish the themes, esthetic and vocabulary of the nascent movement. "Magú", the name by which Luján is most known says of that time:

The significance of Los Four mirrored the socio-political introspection and concerns of Raza at that time besides providing some iconographic vocabulary to initiate definitions of our ethno-art forms. Our Los Four Xicano contingency ran against some Euro-aesthetic standards of the period. We, as pictorial artists, gave a visual voice to those interests of parity for our young constituency-culture. It was a form of cooperation binding us by our sociological circumstance, indigenous paradigms and our adopted response to unify ourselves along political cultural oriented purposes, in lieu of solely aesthetical ones.[1]

From 1976-1981, Luján taught at the La Raza Studies Department at Fresno City College becoming department chair 1980. As of 2005 a professor at Pomona College and resides in Pomona, California.

In 1999 Magú completed a series of murals and sculptures entitled, "Hooray for Hollywood", for the Hollywood/Vine Metro station.[2][3][4]

Magú's artwork became famous in its own right throughout the 1980s and 1990s as it used colorful imagery, anthropomorphic animals, depictions of outrageously proportioned lowrider cars, festooned with indigenous/urban motifs juxtaposed , graffiti,Dia De Los Muertos-style altars and all sorts of borrowings from pop-culture. Magú states:

"My art intentions, over the years, have been to use Mesoamerican heritage as well as implementing current popular Art and cultural folk sources as the content substance to make Chicanarte."[5]

[edit] Installations and Exhibitions

Installations of Magu's work include:

[edit] External links

Topics related to Chicanos and Mexican-Americans
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