MURALS

MARCOS RAYA HIGHLIGHTED AT MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN CHICAGO BY SANDRA TREVIÑO

November 25, 2015Marcos Raya will be featured as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s upcoming exhibit “Surrealism: The Conjured Life,” which opens Nov. 21 and runs through June 5, 2016. Photo by Sandra Treviño

Marcos Raya, one of the city’s most prolific artists, will be featured as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s upcoming exhibit “Surrealism: The Conjured Life,” which opens Nov. 21 and runs through June 5, 2016. The exhibit will showcase over 100 pieces of work that demonstrate the deep currents that surrealism sent through the international art world – and especially through Chicago – since its emergence in the first half of the 20th century. Along with work by Raya, classical surreal work by artists like Remedios Varo, Balthus andLeonora Carrington will be interspersed with international contemporary figures like Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Ann Wilson.Raya arrived in Chicago from Irapuato, Guanajuato in the early 60s, fervent in his desire to create art despite the harsh reality of the neighborhood where his family settled. “It was really bad in that area, ugly, full of gangs and drugs, but it’s where a growing community of Mexicans lived. Eventually, we would all make our way over to Pilsen,” he explained about his time lived in the Little Italy neighborhood.During high school, Raya was introduced to a whole new world of art and was eventually given the opportunity to explore his talents at the prestigious Windsor Mountain School in Massachusetts on a full scholarship from the University of Illinois. He soon became curious about art in general and began traveling to other cities, including time spent back in Mexico City during the turbulent student uprisings of the late 60s, pivotal moments that would influence his work. Exuding the admiration he first felt as a young boy when he met Mexican muralist Jose Chavez Morado, as well as a life-changing visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York during their International Surrealism Exhibit, Raya became and continues to be a pioneer of the muralist movement in Chicago.Throughout his lifetime, his struggles with addiction and his “dog days” when money was scarce, Raya never stopped creating elaborate work and looking for ways to showcase his unique talent. His plethora of surreal and socio-political visual expressions can be found in permanent collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Alfred Smart Museum at the University of Chicago and the Museum of Notre Dame in Indiana with existing murals across Pilsen including his infamous work on 18th Street by Western Avenue. You can also find a great collection at Harbee Liquors & Tavern where owner Steve Fritz has accumulated many of Raya’s pieces.“Back in my early muralist days, there was a political movement, a powerful Chicano movement. That’s where Casa Aztlan came from,” he explained of the time spent in Pilsen creating visual political statements on the streets. “But globalization arrived and thanks to that many of those communities disappeared. Many of those individuals, those solely dedicated to their neighborhood and their parochial ideas, seemed to not realize or wake up to the realization of the dynamics of living in a city like Chicago,” he said with a sense of sadness. He’s only left his home in Pilsen for brief stints while studying or working on his art in other cities.When asked what he thinks about the current work on display in and around Pilsen, Raya said, “We’re in one of the most dynamic cities in the world, the city of Chicago, with its abundance of incredible architecture and you’re out here painting these silly caricatures and what have you… come on, wake up! Take a trip downtown, go to different schools, go to galleries. Study other forms, study other people and get out of your neighborhood because it’s not going to take you anywhere to be stuck in only what you know.”At this weekend’s opening of “Surrealism: The Conjured Life,” Raya will once again exhibit his genius vision of surrealist work, including a self-portrait acrylic on canvas titled “Night Nurse,” surrounded by a cabinet, surgical instruments, a mannequin and found objects. His work speaks volumes on the current state of affairs, while he demonstrates visually the life he’s lived and the life he continues to engage in as the world around him evolves in drastic measure.The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is located at 220 E. Chicago Ave.

FEATURED ARTICLES FROM SURREALISM. THE CONJURED LIFE

February 11, 2016Marcos Raya is featured in articles from Mutual Art and Wall Street International.Mutual Art featured article:
http://www.mutualart.com/OpenArticle/Surrealism-Surprises-at-the-Museum-of-Co/32E4E5373355C762Wall Street International featured article:
http://wsimag.com/art/17528-surrealism-the-conjured-life

Watch Artist Marcos
Raya Talk About His
Inspiration for Night Nurse

ARTIST MARCOS RAYA TALKS ABOUT HIS ARTISTIC PATH AND ENDURING A LONG ART CAREER

An immigrant from Mexico who moved to Chicago at the age of sixteen (1964), Raya has emerged from the Chicago Latino community as a contemporary artist voicing the complexities and socio-political struggles of a world in peril.

Fragments of a ceremonial circumscribing of space are evident in the work of Marcos Raya. Through an extension of his own personal space. Breaking boundaries, his “frontera” is filled with assemblages that takes life from the residue of crisis. His installations operate as both a self portrait and collective history. It is in the context of a merging dual reality of medical and psychological proportions. Repainted furniture, surgical supplies, baroque representations, small reliquaries and the use of plaster cast bodies are all open to his visual commentary. His active space is an aesthetic of abundance and display that presents traces of the ongoing struggles with the urban displacements. Rayas edge is both intimate in a domestic construction and sinister in a SPECTACLE OF PUBLIC DIMENSION. His affinity with surrealism, American pop, Mexican folk and rascuachismo tells the tale of an outsider artist from the inside. An artist who took inspiration from the alleys, streets, cantinas, factories and hospitals shows us the dark side of this very dark world of the 21st Century.Marcos Raya has shown his work in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago, the Snite Museum of the University of Notre Dame, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. He was subject of a retrospective at Institution Ospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara, Mexico and a one man London show in 2013. Marcos Raya will be part of the upcoming exhibition “Surrealism the Configured Life” at Chicago’s MCA in the Fall of 2015

LISTEN TO PODCAST IN ITUNES
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/art-nxt-level-sergio-gomez/id956413262?mt=2

Marcos Raya at Tate Modern: Frida the Last Portrait and the Legacy of Chicano Muralism

Marcos Raya’s Frida the Last Portrait is currently featured at Tate Modern in London as part of Frida: The Making of an Icon, an exhibition exploring how Frida Kahlo became one of the most recognized and reinterpreted cultural figures of the modern era. The Tate exhibition runs from June 25, 2026, to January 3, 2027, and includes works by artists who have responded to Kahlo’s image, politics, identity, and enduring influence.For Raya, the connection to Frida Kahlo is not a matter of simple homage. His work places Kahlo inside a wider history of Mexican muralism, Chicano political art, Chicago’s Pilsen community, and the psychological complexity that has long defined his own visual language. - tate.org.co.uk

Marcos Raya and Muralism in ChicagoThe Tate presentation places Raya within the history of the Chicano mural movement, noting that this movement did not only flourish on the West Coast but also extended into Mexican American communities across the United States, including Pilsen in Chicago.As the exhibition text explains, Raya has been a fixture of Pilsen’s mural art scene since the early 1970s. Inspired by the Chicano civil rights movement, his murals are described as politically engaged, vividly painted, and psychologically dark.Before moving to Chicago at age 16 in 1964 from Irapuato, Mexico, Raya met the muralist José Chávez Morado, part of the generation that followed the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. That lineage is important to understanding Raya’s work. His art carries the public, political, and social force of muralism, but filters it through a deeply personal, surreal, and often unsettling Chicago lens.The National Museum of Mexican Art describes Raya as a Chicago-based mixed media artist and former muralist whose work explores folklore, technology, and political issues. Chicago Public Art Group also notes Raya’s long history in Pilsen and his contributions to public murals throughout Chicago. - National Museum of Mexican Art

Fragments of a ceremonial circumscribing of space are evident in the work of Marcos Raya. Through an extension of his own personal space. Breaking boundaries, his “frontera” is filled with assemblages that takes life from the residue of crisis. His installations operate as both a self portrait and collective history. It is in the context of a merging dual reality of medical and psychological proportions. Repainted furniture, surgical supplies, baroque representations, small reliquaries and the use of plaster cast bodies are all open to his visual commentary. His active space is an aesthetic of abundance and display that presents traces of the ongoing struggles with the urban displacements. Rayas edge is both intimate in a domestic construction and sinister in a SPECTACLE OF PUBLIC DIMENSION. His affinity with surrealism, American pop, Mexican folk and rascuachismo tells the tale of an outsider artist from the inside. An artist who took inspiration from the alleys, streets, cantinas, factories and hospitals shows us the dark side of this very dark world of the 21st Century.Marcos Raya has shown his work in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Smart Museum of the University of Chicago, the Snite Museum of the University of Notre Dame, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. He was subject of a retrospective at Institution Ospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara, Mexico and a one man London show in 2013. Marcos Raya will be part of the upcoming exhibition “Surrealism the Configured Life” at Chicago’s MCA in the Fall of 2015

Frida the Last PortraitAt Tate Modern, Raya is represented by:Marcos Raya
American, born Mexico, 1948
Frida the Last Portrait (Frida el último retrato), 1985
Acrylic on wood
Collection of Ramon and Rosemary VargasThe work is a four-panel portable mural originally created for a one-person play about Frida Kahlo’s life, first staged at the Blue Ryder Theater in Chicago in 1985. The Tate wall label also notes that Raya returned to Frida’s image in several works, including Frida and Her Nurse from 1987 and Frida la sufrida from 1998, both alluding to Kahlo’s chronic ailments.Tate’s shop page for the exhibition confirms Frida the Last Portrait as a 1985 acrylic-on-wood work in the Collection of Ramon and Rosemary Vargas, and describes it as a large-scale painting that incorporates events from Kahlo’s life along with broader Latin American struggles.Embodying FridaThe gallery section where Raya’s work appears also considers the many ways artists have inhabited, performed, and reimagined Frida Kahlo’s identity.The Tate wall text, titled “Embodying Frida,” describes artists using performance and photographic intervention to explore gender fluidity, cultural hybridity, and the politics of representation. In that context, Raya’s Frida the Last Portrait stands apart as a work rooted in muralism and theater: a painted object made for performance, portable yet monumental, personal yet political.This makes Raya’s contribution especially resonant. His Frida is not only an icon or a symbol. She becomes part of a Chicago story, a Chicano story, and a larger conversation about pain, identity, migration, and cultural memory.A Chicago Artist in a Global ConversationThe inclusion of Marcos Raya at Tate Modern places his work within an international conversation around Frida Kahlo’s legacy. But it also points back to Chicago: to Pilsen, to the Chicano mural movement, and to the artists who transformed neighborhood walls into places of memory, resistance, and imagination.Raya’s art has always resisted easy categories. His paintings, murals, collages, and installations combine Mexican folklore, political critique, technology, personal history, and surreal psychological imagery. His presence in Frida: The Making of an Icon is a reminder that Kahlo’s influence did not travel in one direction only. It was absorbed, challenged, and transformed by artists like Raya, whose own work carries the urgency of lived experience.For visitors encountering Frida the Last Portrait at Tate Modern, the painting offers more than an image of Frida Kahlo. It offers a bridge between Mexico, Chicago, theater, muralism, and the ongoing reinvention of cultural icons.

Further ReadingTate Modern — Frida: The Making of an Icon
Official exhibition information from Tate Modern. Read moreTate Shop — Marcos Raya: Frida the Last Portrait
Artwork listing connected to the exhibition, including title, date, medium, dimensions, and collection credit. Read moreNational Museum of Mexican Art — Marcos Raya
Artist profile with background on Raya’s Chicago-based practice, mural history, and recurring themes. Read moreThe Guardian review of Frida: The Making of an Icon
A critical review of the Tate exhibition and its focus on Frida Kahlo’s image, influence, and cultural afterlife. Read moreAP Newsroom — How Frida Kahlo became a global icon
Video/news coverage mentioning Marcos Raya’s 1985 mural made for a play about Frida’s life. Read more