Miguel Aragón
For the past several years I have been exploring the violent events in Mexico due to the War on Drugs, mainly concentrating on the casualties and the position of the corpse in public view. Now, I want to explore this subject matter from a different view: those left behind. Through continued visits to my birth city of Juárez, México, I noticed the changes in the urban landscape and people’s attitude towards being outside their home. Houses started to look like bunkers or self-imposed prisons to protect themselves from the outside violence; neighborhoods gated themselves (illegally) to limit the movement in their streets, and a city of roughly 1.5 million in population had an eerie feeling of a ghost town.
Miguel A. Aragón was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, México; currently he resides in Brooklyn, NY and he is an Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island. His work is included in the books A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking by Matthew Egan, Michael Ehlbeck and Heather Muise; and in Arte Tejano: de campos, barrios y fronteras by Cesáreo Moreno and published by Smithsonian Latino Center and Fundación OSDE. In 2012 he received the Artist of the Year in Printmaking Award by the Austin Visual Arts Association and the Austin Critics Table Award for Artist of the Year. His work has been exhibited and reviewed nationally and internationally in venues such as the International Print Center New York, Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco CA, FotoFest in Houston TX, OSDE Espacio de Arte in Argentina, Austin Museum of Art, Mexic-Arte Museum, and in countries such as Canada, Japan, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, New Zealand, Germany and the United Kingdom. His work is also included in numerous public and private collections; these include The University of Arkansas Little Rock, National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago IL; Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin TX; Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Fort Wayne IN and Kyoto International Woodcut Association in Kyoto Japan to name a few.