Abel Alejandre: Scenic: Landscapes of an Empire

Abel Alejandre is a multidisciplinary artist working in representational painting, graphite drawing and printmaking. Born in Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, Mexico, he immigrated with his family to Los Angeles in 1975, and in 1984 worked as a muralist through a Long Beach summer youth program connected to the Los Angeles Olympics. He holds an associate's degree from Long Beach City College and is largely self-taught. His practice is built through slow, labor-intensive methods of dense crosshatching and layered tone, and his work has long examined masculinity, how it is constructed, inherited and performed. In his ongoing project "Xicanoland," including "The Chicano Moon Landing of 1968" and "The Age of Heroes," he builds a speculative counter-archive that reclaims Chicano and Indigenous futurity. His work is in the collections of LACMA and the National Museum of Mexican Art, and he created a public commission for LA Metro's Westwood/Rancho Park station.