A Zapotec Muralist on Our Walls

Michel Antonio Cruz was born in San Pedro Comitancillo, Oaxaca, and his work has never strayed far from that fact. Murals, drawing and painting are the means. Zapotec identity, read through contemporary culture, is the subject.

His training began at the Xhuba Ziña workshop in Juchitán, Oaxaca, and continued at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca. He went on to study in workshops under Tomás Pineda Matus, Rolando Rojas and Ivonne Kennedy. What came out of that sequence is a visual language of his own, dense with symbolism and built on mixed techniques.

He has taken part in more than twenty group exhibitions, among them Instant Lunch, Manimal, Los Pactos de Expresión, Teoría del color and Lade Yu. His work has been shown at the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, the Museo Estatal de Arte Popular de Oaxaca and the Casa de la Ciudad, and in 2022 he held a solo exhibition in Brooklyn, New York, titled Biaani’ / Luz.

His paintings are now held in private collections in Mexico, Guatemala, Germany, Italy and Rwanda, and in Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

He is painting at Campus Las Quintas, in a work that sets his own identity, history and roots alongside the character of our school. We are grateful to have him here, and glad that our students get to watch a mural being made rather than simply find one finished.