Rubén Trejo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rubén Trejo (January 7, 1937 – July 19, 2009) was an American sculptor and painter who served as a professor at Eastern Washington University.
Trejo's work addresses issues within the Chicano and Latino community, but also discusses culture, race, history, and faith. His work is part of the permanent collections at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Trejo was born in 1937 in St. Paul, Minnesota in a CB&Q boxcar. His parents were Tarascan indigenous people from Michoacan, Mexico who came to the United States in the 1910s or 20s to do railroad work. Trejo had 11 siblings, four of whom died soon after birth. His mother never learned English, so he spoke Spanish at home and English in school.
As a child, Trejo traveled around the country performing migrant farm work with his siblings until the early 1950s. In Minnesota and Indiana they picked potatoes, onions, and sugar beets and tomatoes.[1] The family lived in a primarily white communities; in Trejo and his siblings were often the only Mexican Americans in their classes and often felt left out by their classmates. According to Trejo. he looked self-identification through other sources, especially art.[1]
Trejo earned his M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Minnesota in 1969. He also earned a minor in Latin American Literature. His art professors often suggested he look to the white artists for inspiration, but he instead went artists and writers such as Octavio Paz and Guillermo Gómez-Pena.[1]
