ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
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Diego Herrera was born in Mexico City in 1972 and lived in a working-class neighborhood until the age of twelve. After the devastating 1985 earthquake, the Herrera family moved to a small village in the state of Puebla. After completing secondary school, like many other young Mexicans, Diego moved to the United States, arriving in Chicago in the spring of 1990.
In Chicago, Diego worked first as a dishwasher and later as a busboy. In 2000, Mr. Herrera returned to school and earned his GED from Truman College. In 2001, he began taking classes at the City College of San Francisco in California, where he completed an Associate of Arts degree. In 2009, Diego was accepted into the University of Maryland’s Anthropology Department, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology.
Since childhood, Mr. Herrera has been interested in art. He painted and wrote poetry in his free time. While living in Chicago, Diego enrolled in an art course by mail and taught himself the essential elements of drawing and painting. After graduating from UMD, Mr. Herrera dedicated more of his free time to developing his unique technique.
On March 4, 2015, Diego presented his artwork publicly for the first time at RAW Artists DC, where he exhibited for three consecutive years. Mr. Herrera has also shown his work at the University of Maryland, College Park, with the group of artists known as the Latin American Art League, and most recently Diego's paintings were shown at the SuperFair in Washington DC.
Statement
DIEGO HERRERA
ARTIST STATEMENT
Over the years my art has evolved in ways I never imagine when I first started painting. I expect that my art would continue to mature in the future, but I also know that my own individual perspective will continue to inform my paintings. I see my paintings as a reflection of my inner landscape, informed by my experience as: a Mexican American, as a Nahuatl Indigenous Latino, as a man of color, as a member of a diaspora.
My early work concentrated on the subconscious nature of art as I explored through abstract painting the issues that are not always obvious to the artist. I did not plan my pieces but allow the mood of the moment to dominate. The result was a series of geometric acrylic painting saturated in bright colors, and then I attempted to explain their uniformity, I came to the conclusion that these geometric figures represented my own need to classify the world in order to understand it. As a Mexican immigrant this world was largely unknown, and my place in it seemed at times dubious, as a young man I struggle to fit in, but I always found a refuge in my canvases.
More recently I have worked with figurative painting using oils. The process is different, but the result is a continuation of what I learned in previous work. I continue to utilize my art as my way to connect to larger world. Time after time I return to the exercise of self-portraiture as a means to place myself in the structure of society. I as the man of color. Therefore, when I paint myself I do it with primary colors overlaid by secondary colors, and by primary colors again. Sometimes yellow dominates, some times red fights for its rightful place, but in the end all colors inhabit the canvas and create something new; the new American man, desended from the original people of this land.
Currently I find myself experimenting with landscapes. The sky is the limit, and water holds a strong fascination for me. In my paintings the Sky and water are at times in unison, but others, they seem at war with each other. Color in these paintings is applied in multiple thin layers so that the layers underneath are always visible. I see landscapes as my need to create connections between my environment, as an attempt to become one with it. My past informs my art; the colors of my Mexican heritage find refuge in the Californian Coast. Members of diaspora always feel disconnected in spite of being successful at assimilation. My art explores all this because it is conceived in the restless mind of an immigrant.
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