Alejandro Romero: 1948—: Painter and Muralist Biography

The epic art of the Mexican muralist school meets the pulsating energy of Latin American neighborhood streets in the works of Alejandro Romero, one of the best-known and most visible Hispanic visual artists in the United States. Trained in Mexico, Romero moved to Chicago in 1975 and began to adorn that city with murals, posters, and conventional paintings. His emotionally intense works, influenced by European expressionism as well as by Mexican styles, take up a variety of themes—music, the pre-Columbian past, the containment of natural human impulses by the strictures of modern society, the relationship between Mexico and North America, and others—fusing them into a complex and powerful personal vision.

Alejandro Romero was born in the Mexican state of Tabasco, near Veracruz, in 1948, but grew up and attended school in Mexico City. The family lived in the Tepeyac district, known in Mexican religious history as the site of the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His mother, who had studied architecture in her younger days, bought him an easel when he was 15 and encouraged him to become an artist. "But," Romero told Hispanic magazine, "I became an artist because it was something in me." Indeed, Romero's nine siblings all displayed a creative streak, and Romero has worked with some of them on creative projects over the course of his career.