Artist Miguel Aragón’s work has “always” explored mortality in some way or other.
The printmaker grew up in Juarez, Mexico, just on the other side of the border from El Paso, Texas, and saw the way the city and the people of Juarez were changed by “drug wars” and violence.
“It was something that I was always interested in, intrigued, and [I] kept sort of reading the stories and seeing the pictures, because I knew that it was important,” Aragón said in a Zoom interview from the campus of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, where he was a visiting faculty member this week.
But Aragón wasn’t originally planning to explore those themes through his work.
It took time to find his “voice,” he said, and eventually, he realized there was no way he could avoid the subject.
“It just kind of opened my eyes, in that there were events that were just obviously very powerful and very difficult to live in,” Aragón said.
Now, though, Aragón’s work has a different tone. It still contemplates mortality, but now in a more positive light: After his mother’s death in 2019, Aragón decided to “shift gears” away from the drug wars to focus on art that honors his mother instead.
“It's sort of like a different energy, a different aspect, because I'm trying to celebrate it,” Aragón said. “And so I want the work to be more cheerful — not as dramatic or as grim, I guess, I would say, but still also obviously all about mortality, because she's making me think about her mortality, but then also about my own mortality.”
Aragón’s mother died of a heart attack, as did his father years before. He’s aware of his own predisposition — hence that reflection about his own mortality, too — but the work doesn’t dwell as much on the cause of death as it does on the effect.
“Really, the work is more about having a conversation with my mom through the afterlife,” Aragón said.
Now, splitting his time between New York City and Berlin, Germany, Aragón is an artist with an international reputation.
His work, exploring themes of mortality, violence, memory and perception, is in public collections at institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.
And he travels, as much as he can, to engage in workshops and residencies like this week’s visit to Anderson Ranch, “because it's sort of an excuse for me to go and explore other cities, other environments, other countries,” he said.
“I want to experience all kinds of places and cultures and languages and landscapes because growing up on the border, we have this duality that we have two cultures, two languages and two ways of thinking,” he said. “And that is very ingrained in me, and it's something that I'm always finding, also, in my work.”
But Aragón didn’t plan on this path.
He became an artist “kind of by mistake,” he said with a laugh, and got “hooked” on printmaking in an art class that was a requirement for his graphic design studies at the University of Texas in El Paso.
“I'm not a traditional printmaker,” Aragón said. “I consider myself more as an experimental printmaker, because I just really enjoy taking two different things and putting them together to create something new and something exciting. That's where I find the power for my own work, and I approach life in that way.”
