Gilbert Luján

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Cruising Turtle Island, 1986

Gilbert "Magú" Luján (born 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 ancestryfrom the current delineation of West Texas. Six months later, his family relocated to East Los Angeles, California, where he spent his childhood and adolescence.

After serving in the Air Force, Luján returned home from three years in England in 1962 and began to attend college, first at East Los Angeles College, then to California State University, Long Beach, where he earned his B.A. in Ceramic Sculpture in 1969 and then to University of California, Irvine, where he earned an M.F.A. in Sculpture in 1973. By this time East L.A. had become a hotbed of socio-political and cultural activity, as the Chicano Movement became a turbulent and exciting social force in the communities the U.S. Southwest. At this time Luján began to organize art exhibits(1964) and 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 Fall of 1973 at the University of California, Irvine. In 1973, Los Four had their premiere exhibition at UC Irvine. In 1974, Los Four exhibited at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the first-ever Chicano Art exhibit "Los Four." 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 artist 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 1976-1980, 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 the Pomona Art Colony, California.

In 1990 Magú was commissioned as a design principal along with architect Adolfo Miralles for the Hollywood & Vine station on the Red Line in Los Angeles, California. By 1999 Magú completed a series of wall tiles and platform sculptural benches in the form of Low-Rider automobiles. He chose the theme song, "Hooray for Hollywood", as the signature tune for the Hollywood & Vine Metro station. The Yellow Brick Road (from the plaza to the train platform) is a prominent motif taken from the 1939 classic movie “The Wizard of Oz.“ [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 lowrider cars, festooned with indigenous/urban motifs juxtaposed , graffiti,Dia De Los Muertos installation 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:

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
University of California, Irvine
Brooklyn Museum
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Guadalupe Center for the Arts
Centro de la Raza, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA
"Inaugural Museum Show" at the El Paso Art Museum, El Paso, Texas
"Le Demon des Anges", a European Art Tour, with 16 Chicano Artists in Nante & Leon, France; Barcelona, Spain; and in Sweden
"Caliente y Picante" an HBO Art Special