Bio

Miguel A. Aragón was born in Juárez, México. 

He lives and works in New York City (USA) and Berlin (Germany); he is an Associate Professor in Printmaking and Chairperson of the Department of Performing & Creative Arts, College of Staten Island, The City University of New York. Aragón has exhibited internationally at venues including the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; Uferhallen, Berlin, and the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists, Canada, to name a few. His awards and residences include NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship; KALA Art Institute fellowship and residency, Berkeley, CA; East London Printmakers Keyholder Residency, England; The Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia fellowship residency, Italy; and Till Richter Museum, Buggenhagen, Germany, among many others. His work is held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; and Minneapolis Institute of Art. Aragón’s work has been published in A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking (Greenville, NC: Wellington B. Gray Gallery, 2012), ¡Printing the Revolution!: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020) and more. In 2022, he was nominated for The Queen Sonja Print Award, Norway; and was awarded the 2022 Southern Graphics Council International Mid-Career Printmaker Award.

Artist's Statement

As an artist I relate to this idea of pursuing a goal that is only based on potential, no concrete evidence exist that my work will function, and along the way many mistakes and failures are encountered; however, I must push through all of these because I have a belief. 

Through my work I continue the exploration of trying to capture and freeze a specific moment, the marks of time, conveying the transitory nature of memory, reflecting on the process of recollection and alluding to the transitory nature of human existence. 

Beginning with the idea of erasure as language, I explore subjects of violence, memory, perception and the multiple concentrating on the use of processes that are reductive in nature to create artwork. Any form of erasure, however violently destructive, can be seen as constructive in some way; something comes through the destruction, the negation of an image is not actually nothing.

The negation takes its form from the erasure of a particular image; it is my intention to transform it, from crude and unbearable into a more beguiling or subtle form for presenting disturbing events. Thus, the void becomes a space nurturing memory of what was there before engaging the viewer into a more lasting experience with a difficult subject matter to provide a sense of catharsis. 

Representations of the visible will always show residues and traces of the invisible; the images I create connect the spheres of what can be seen and what can be only intuited. My work is derived from a need to find meaning in distressing events that repositions mortality in our field of vision, reminding us that our physical existence is finite.