"Multiple backgrounds can form such two- and three-dimensional ideas
that they take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich
background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the
University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Russian
history, Shakespeare, English literature, or Freud . . . had to do with
cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota, picking potatoes in Hoople,
North Dakota, or visiting relatives in Michoacán. This diversity of
ideas can produce a three-headed monster or an artist, and I chose the
latter." -Ruben Trejo
Ruben Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y más allá is the first
comprehensive survey of Trejo's art and career. It focuses on more than
fifty works from 1964 through the present, including pieces from his
delightful life-size, puppet-like Clothes for Day of the Dead series;
works from the Calzones series -- cast bronze underwear and jalapenos --
that challenge the Spanish machismo culture; seminal examples of his
lifelong exploration of the cruciform image; and much more. The volume
includes biographical and interpretive essays, as well as a chronology,
list of exhibitions, and bibliography.
Ruben Trejo (1937-2009) was born in a Chicago, Burlington & Quincy
railroad yard in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his father, a mixed Tarascan
Indian and Hispanic from Michoacán, Mexico, and his mother, from Ixtlan
in the same Mexican province, had found a home for the family in a
boxcar while his father worked for the railroad. Trejo became the first
in his family to graduate from college, and in 1973 he moved to the
Pacific Northwest, where he began a thirty-year association with Eastern
Washington University as teacher and artist.
His isolation from major centers of Chicano culture led him to search
for self-identity through his art. Influenced and inspired by such
writers and artists as Octavio Paz and Guillermo Gómez-Pena, he explored
a dynamic, multidimensional worldview through his sculpture and
mixed-media pieces and created a body of work that deftly limns his
identity as an artist and a Chicano. Throughout his long teaching
career, he worked tirelessly to create opportunities for young Chicanos
through tutoring and mentoring.
