About
Salvador Andrade Arévalo is a painter/printmaker that currently resides in Mexico City. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and raised in the Chicagoland area. He received his BA from Yale University with a double major in Art (printmaking concentration) and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration. He also holds a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge in Latin American Studies, having written a thesis on 19th Century Mexican lithography (2012). Most recently, he completed a Painting Fulbright in Mexico City (2018). This winter, he will be pursuing his MFA in Painting & Printmaking at the Yale School of Art, as a part of the 2022 cohort.
Salvador’s current practice is informed by his upbringing as a Mexican immigrant in Chicago and by the untold histories of his migrant family. His Mexican-American heritage traces through four generations of migration that began with his great-grandfather. Given that his family has oscillated between rural Mexico and Chicago for over a century, his work centers on the materiality of migrant labor and on the power structures that facilitate the perpetual liminality of disenfranchised and marginalized communities. As a trained printmaker, he relies on a mixed media format that explores materials used by laborers. In this way, he communes with his family's migrant legacy, and he celebrates the history of a family that was never formally educated. More importantly, he reasserts their histories in the face of a traditional Western canon that has ignored them, and upheld the neoliberal and capitalist power structures that leech from the labor of individuals seeking fair living conditions. By doing so, he disrupts the xenophobia currently plaguing America's current political landscape. And he makes space for migrant communities in a time when migrants are being persecuted, caged, and jailed.
Salvador’s current practice is informed by his upbringing as a Mexican immigrant in Chicago and by the untold histories of his migrant family. His Mexican-American heritage traces through four generations of migration that began with his great-grandfather. Given that his family has oscillated between rural Mexico and Chicago for over a century, his work centers on the materiality of migrant labor and on the power structures that facilitate the perpetual liminality of disenfranchised and marginalized communities. As a trained printmaker, he relies on a mixed media format that explores materials used by laborers. In this way, he communes with his family's migrant legacy, and he celebrates the history of a family that was never formally educated. More importantly, he reasserts their histories in the face of a traditional Western canon that has ignored them, and upheld the neoliberal and capitalist power structures that leech from the labor of individuals seeking fair living conditions. By doing so, he disrupts the xenophobia currently plaguing America's current political landscape. And he makes space for migrant communities in a time when migrants are being persecuted, caged, and jailed.