In Passing: Fronteño Epics Across Time, Juan de Dios Mora and Zeke Peña
Mar 3–Jun 4, 2023
Image Gallery
Zeke Pena, River History is an excerpt from River Stories (2019), an on going project illustrating oral histories about the River that sustains the present-day Paso Del Norte region.
Juan de Dios Mora, Montando a la Escoba Voladora Riding the flying broom, Linocut Print Image size 17in. x 25 ¾ in. Paper size 22 in. x 30 in 2010.
In Passing: Fronteño Epics Across Time, Juan de Dios Mora and Zeke Peña
Mar 3–Jun 4, 2023
This two-person exhibition explores themes of belonging and community through vivid and fantastic imagery. Zeke Peña and Juan de Dios Mora have cultivated distinct, graphic styles to build worlds which expand time and space to address immigration and human rights, influenced by science fiction and satirical and cartooning traditions.
Biography
Zeke Peña is a Xicano storyteller and cartoonist from El Paso, TX. He makes comics and visual narratives that reclaim stories and remix history. His work is a mash-up of political cartoon, border rasquache and Hip Hop culture that addresses universal themes of identity, politics, ecology and social justice. He received a degree in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and is self-taught in the studio. He has received awards for his book illustrations and his work is in several American and Xicano art collections. Zeke is currently writing forthcoming comic and book projects that he will illustrate.
Juan de Dios Mora was born in Yahualica, Mexico. In 1998, his family immigrated to the United States. In 2009, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Painting and a Master of Fine Arts specializing in Printmaking in 2011. He acquired both degrees from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). To this day, he is working in the art department at UTSA as an Assistant Professor of art.
Mora concentrates in the printmaking technique of relief to create narratives of Mexican-American experiences. His experiences living along the border (US and Mexico) provide an awaking of social and political concepts that heavily influence his artistic, aesthetic and conceptual ideas.
Mora has been included in exhibitions across United States, Mexico, and Japan. Venues featuring his work are McNay Museum; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; and Kyoto Municipal Museum, Japan.
Institutions that have acquired his work include, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, OR; McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX; University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, HI; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; The Smithsonian America Art Museum, Washington, DC.