Carlos Almaraz

Carlos Almaraz (October 5, 1941 – December 11, 1989) was a Mexican-American artist and an early proponent of the Chicano street arts movement.
"Almaraz was born in 1941 in Mexico City, but his parents quickly moved … first to Chicago, then to East LA in 1950. His experience of these widely differing environments probably inflected his vision of the world. He attended Garfield High, went on to CalState LA, Loyola, and Otis; tried to make it in the New York art scene for five years; then returned to LA in 1970. In between New York and East Los was a brief visit to Mexico to learn about its art, to explore what he increasingly saw as his Chicano heritage. ..His technique ranges from the literally figurative to almost abstract blurs and splatters, sometimes all in the same painting. There is a sense of layered meaning, and an immensely singular use of color, but his figures are usually representative and even sensual.His new fascination appeared to be with ideas based on world myths, transplanted into his own personal LA, whose nocturnal Echo Park flaunted purple lagoons with peaked bridges and small craft like paper boats, whose bright lit skyscrapers sway in a giant, concrete cumbia …
Where prim little Eastside bungalows can offer the solace of home and hearth or can just as easily burst into fiery explosion … Where terrifying car crashes offer all the colors of a garden in springtime… Where stag-headed buck-dancers flit through twilight landscapes of drifting symbols…
Where sinister magicians hold forth on mystic stages… All in a gathering darkness that seems increasingly to enfold his work until his tragic death by AIDS in 1989..."(.scpr.org )

Carlos Almaraz

Carlos Almaraz (October 5, 1941 – December 11, 1989) was a Mexican-American artist and an early proponent of the Chicano street arts movement.
Almaraz was born in Mexico City, but his family moved when he was a young child, settling in Chicago, Illinois, where his father owned a restaurant for five years and worked in Gary steel mills for another four. The neighborhood Almaraz and his brother were raised in was multicultural, which led him to appreciate the melting pot of American culture.During his youth in Chicago, the family traveled to Mexico City frequently, where Almaraz reports having his "first impression of art" that "was both horrifying and absolutely magical", in other words "Sublime". 

 A painting of John the Baptist in the Mexico City cathedral appeared as a gorilla to his young eye and frightened him, but it also taught him "that art can be something almost alive." When Almaraz was nine his family moved to Los Angeles on a doctor's recommendation that his father seek a warm climate to assuage his rheumatism, and also as a result of family problems, first settling in Wilmington, later moving to the then-rural Chatsworth, where they lived in communal housing with other Mexicans.[The family then relocated to a Mexican "colony" of the nearly-all-white Beverly Hills, and still later to the barrio of East Los Angeles. Almaraz's interest in the arts, nascent in Chicago, blossomed after his family moved to California, and the sense of mobility developed after so many moves later allowed him to connect with migrant farmworkers and their children. He graduated from Garfield High School in 1959 and attended Los Angeles City College, studying under David Ramirez, and took summer classes at Loyola Marymount University. Loyola offered him a full scholarship, but he declined it in protest of the University's support of the Vietnam War and stopped professing the Catholic faith altogether. He attended California State University, Los Angeles but became discouraged by the structure of the art department there, "because there was no place for an artist." While at CSULA, Almaraz began attending night courses at the Otis College of Art and Design, then known as Otis Art Institute, studying under Joe Mugnaini.Wikipedia