BIOGRAPHY

I was born in El Salvador and the formative years of my youth were in the 1980s, when my country was beginning to bleed incurably from the wounds of war. A restless desire to make art was always with me, but initially I opted to undertake a more practical career: I began studying business administration at the National School of Commerce.

I was always in direct contact with painting and artists since for generations my family had been in the framing business. This, as well as the sociopolitical condition of my country, induced me to assume art as my role in life, not only as a profession but also as an alternative form of resistance to the oppression of the regime in those years.

In November of 1989, I came to the United States and started to explore new techniques. At first, I joined CODICES, a group of artists working in support of Salvadoran culture, and then, for five years, I was part of a project at the KALA Art Institute in Berkeley directed by Claudia Bernardi. Here I learned various techniques of etching and printmaking.

In 2009, I founded a cultural project in my art studio, No Right Turn Studio. I yielded my space to this project in an attempt to fill a gap in our Latin American community. A place where many artistic disciplines could converge with the historical necessity that forces us to rethink certain codes or reconceptualize our principles as a society. No Right Turn Studio hosted visual art, music, documentaries, reading workshops, etc. This cultural project was successful since we do not have a place to embrace all these Latin American activities in San Francisco. The most satisfying event we were involved in was the co-production of the Silvio Rodríguez concert in 2010.

Today, I am working independently on painting, printmaking, installations, and mixed media. One of my most recent fascinations is jewelry design. Teaching is another of my passions, so I participate in different programs here in the Bay Area and other countries as well.

I have had an opportunity to exhibit my work in group shows with well-known artists, such as Francisco Toledo, Claudia Bernardi, Rupert García, Enrique Chagoya, and Nathan Oliveira. Since 1993, my work, in addition to being shown at numerous venues in the Bay Area, has been exhibited in El Salvador, Mexico, Japan, Cuba, Hawaii, and various cities in the United States.