Visual artist Enrique Chagoya investigates contemporary satire, popular culture, cultural migrations, and foreign policy, with disarming depth and humor. Born in Mexico City, Chagoya lives and works in San Francisco.

Chagoya's large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings, paintings, artist's books, and multiples are exercises in freedom of expression—remixes of culture, language, and popular icons. Chagoya's discursive sampling of stereotypes and propaganda subvert narratives of nation, citizen, and global economy, provoking dialogue, laughter, and reflection.

Chagoya juxtaposes past and present, including American popular culture, pre-Columbian mythology, Western religious iconography, and Goya's Disasters of War. Recent series include Chagoya's Borderlandia and an Illegal Alien's Guide to Existentialism or My Private Border Patrol (2008), charcoal drawings, and paintings reflecting current anxieties about illegal immigration, war, and xenophobia in a post-9/11 world. A retrospective exhibition and catalogue, Borderlandia was commissioned by the Art Center in Pasadena, before traveling to the Berkeley Art Museum.

Chagoya is a professor of art at Stanford University, with a focus on printmaking and painting. Chagoya studied economics and art before he immigrated to the United States, where he also worked as a union organizer and as director of Galeria de la Razain San Francisco.

His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Metropolitan Museum; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chagoya has been awarded by the National Endowment of the Arts, the Tiffany Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Artadia Foundation.

The Graduate Program in Fine Arts Lecture Series is programmed by lecturer Binta Ayofemi and program chair Ted Purves.