Gilbert Magu Luján

Visual artist Gilbert “Magu” Luján’s paintings typically contain bright, colorful imagery often featuring anthoplomorphic animals, lowrider cars, graffiti, offrendas, and borrowings from pop culture. Luján was born in French Camp, California to parents of Mexican and Native American ancestry. He lived in migrant worker camps as a toddler and spent time in Guadalajara with his mother’s family before his family moved to Los Angeles around the start of World War II. After serving in the Air Force, he returned to California in 1962 and studied at East Los Angeles College and California State University at Long Beach, where he earned a B.A. in ceramics, and University of California at Irvine, where he earned an M.F.A. in sculpture. Luján, inspired by the Chicano Movement and activism of the United Farm Workers, organized exhibition and artists’ conferences in support of Chicano art. He started creating murals in East Los Angeles in the early 1970s. In 1973, he joined Frank Romero, Carlos Almaráz and Roberto de la Rocha in founding a local art collective known as Los Four. Los Four had their first show at the UC Irvine and exhibited at the Los Angeles Count Museum of Art’s first show of Chicano art in 1974. The group collaborated on murals and public art installations around California during the next ten years, influencing the definition and esthetic of Chicano art. From 1976 to 1981, Luján taught at the La Raza Studies Department at Fresno City College becoming department chair 1980. He operated an art studio in downtown Pomona, California from 1999 to 2007 and accepted a job as an art professor at Pomona College in 2005. He died in 2011 from cancer. His work has been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, UC Irvine, the Brooklyn Museum, Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, as well as internationally in France, Spain, and Sweden.