Alejandro Romero: 1948—: Painter and Muralist

In 1979 Romero first gained wide recognition in what would become one of this most characteristic media: the event-based poster. He has created images for more than 75 posters displayed in the Chicago area, including those for such major events as the Chicago Jazz Festival. The posters fit with the populist aspect of Romero's aims—"A lot of people can't buy my paintings, but they can afford posters," he pointed out to Hispanic—but they were also ideally suited to his style, which tends toward both high impact and complexity. The intense colors of his works attract the viewer's attention to a poster, but his paintings tend to contain multiple elements that may embody various responses to the theme of the event being advertised.

Romero is likewise well known for his murals, of which he has executed at least eight in the United States and Mexico. One Romero mural, "I've Known Rivers," covers the walls of a pedestrian tunnel leading to the terminals of Chicago's O'Hare Airport; another, commissioned by the Chicago Historical Society, depicts the history of the labor movement in Chicago. That work, traversing a span of time from the 19th-century Haymarket Riot to the city's modern Mexican-American working class, shows Romero's debt to the sweeping historical vistas seen in the works of the great Mexican muralists.

Though his art is rooted in Chicago and in his Mexican homeland, Romero has attracted international attention in the art world. In 1985 alone his works were exhibited in group shows in Canada, England, Japan, and the former Yugoslavia as well as in California, and his work has been the subject of individual exhibitions in England and Italy, among other places. In 1996 Romero's work was included in a historical retrospective of art made by Chicagoans at the city's Museum of Contemporary Art, helping to bridge the gap between the the world of experimental contemporary art and the cultures of ethnic communities.