Hugo Crosthwaite (born 1971) is a Tijuana-born contemporary artist whose work encompasses black and white graphite and charcoal drawings, stop-motion animations, paintings, and large-scale murals. His artwork is improvisational, emerging from his portrait-drawing practice that often relies on his observations of real people in Tijuana. Crosthwaite's artwork combines portraiture, art historical references, comic book references, urban signage, commercial facades, and mythology to create layered compositions that comment on life in the border regions of San Diego/Tijuana. Crosthwaite’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (United States), Morgan Library & Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Museum of Mexican Art, Museum of Latin American Art, the FEMSA Collection, Mexico City and private collections in the U.S. and around the world. In 2019, Crosthwaite won first prize in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for his submission of a stop-motion animated video entitled A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chavez. He was subsequently awarded a commission for a stop motion portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2022, which the National Portrait Gallery debuted in 2022.
Early life and education
Early years and education Crosthwaite was born in 1971 in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, and grew up in the tourist town of Rosarito, where his parents owned a curio shop. His experience working in the shop throughout his childhood inspired later artworks. In interviews, he has noted that while working in the curio shop, he practiced selling the idea of Tijuana and the idea of Mexico to U.S. American tourists, even if this idea did not reflect the reality of the city. As a child salesperson, he told stories about items in the shop in order to make a profit, noting that U.S. American tourists were eager to accept the exoticized, unrealistic, or false narratives about the souvenirs they were buying. This practice of storytelling sparked Crosthwaite’s creative interest and narrative impulse. In a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he explained that the shop was an "organized mess," with every corner filled with curiosities for sale. He said, “That’s what Tijuana is. At first impression, it looks chaotic. But it has an order to it.” Crosthwaite identifies working in the curio shop and growing up in the frenetic urban landscape of Tijuana are foundational forces in his art.
He was raised as a Roman Catholic and has revealed that his mother wished that he and his two brothers to become priests. One of Crosthwaite's brothers ultimately joined the Dominican Order and currently teaches at the Angelicum School in Rome. Though Crosthwaite did not enter a religious life, elements of his Catholic upbringing pervade his artwork. In 1997, Crosthwaite graduated from San Diego State University with a B.A. in Applied Arts and Sciences. He lives and works between San Diego, USA and Rosarito, Mexico.
Career
Awards In 2014, Crosthwaite was awarded the Grand Prize at the 11th FEMSA Monterrey Biennial. The winning work was titled Tijuana Radiant Shine No. 1, graphite and acrylic paint on panel, and measured 31 x 61 inches (79 x 176 cm). In 2019, Crosthwaite won first prize in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for his submission of a stop-motion animated video entitled A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chavez. He was subsequently awarded with doing a portrait drawing of Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2022, which he also completed through the medium of stop-motion animation, with accompanying drawings.
Permanent collections Crosthwaite’s work is included in the following permanent collections: the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; University of Arkansas Art Gallery, Little Rock, AR; FEMSA Collection, Mexico; CECUT/Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico; and private collections in the U.S. and around the world. Crosthwaite has been represented by the Luis de Jesus Los Angeles gallery since 2012.
Artwork
Early work Crosthwaite's first solo exhibition in the U.S. was in 2001, at Galerie D’Art International in Solana Beach, California. Later that year, Crosthwaite exhibited his work alongside eight other artists from Tijuana in the show PinturaFresca (Wet Paint) organized by Luis Ituarte at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State Los Angeles. Crosthwaite’s work for this exhibition was entitled Tablas de Novena, and illustrated a series of human nudes undergoing judgment, inspired by scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Crosthwaite encounter the Divine Comedy as a child through the engravings of the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré in an edition of The Divine Comedy owned by his father. Art critic and feature writer Holly Meyers cited Crothewaite's nine-part series for PinturaFresca (Wet Paint), which depicted Christian themes of paradise, judgment, and purgatory, as among the most powerful works in the show. She describes the series as “dark, deep, heartfelt works that tower over the rest of the show like a daunting spiritual conscience."
In 2010, after reading a review of Crosthwaite's work written by Leah Ollman for Art in America, collector Richard Harris commissioned Crosthwaite to create a monumental work for his collection, Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection. The 25 x 11 foot graphite on board drawing, Death March, was exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2012. Death March depicts a funerary procession and Day of the Dead celebration, referencing engravings by nineteenth-century Mexican graphic artist José Guadalupe Posada, Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man by James Ensor, and The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Solo exhibitions
Tijuanerias, 2012 In 2012, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles mounted a solo exhibition, Tijuanerias, consisting of 102 drawings and installation, which explores the “Black Legend.” As a result of the show, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired ten of Crosthwaite's drawings. Also in 2012, Crosthwaite's work Bartolomé, purchased by the San Diego Museum of Art, was included in Behold, America!, a collaborative exhibition which presents art of the United States from three San Diego museums, at The San Diego Museum of Art. Tijuanerias was a series of 102 ink and wash drawings that depicted Crosthwaite’s satirical interpretation of Tijuana’s Leyenda Negra (“Black Legend”), the stigma of social perversion and vice that has surrounded Tijuana since the 1920s. The drawings feature prostitutes, madmen, and addicts surrounded by drug violence, murder, and narco wealth, waiting to cross over a socio-political border, almost as if Tijuana is purgatory. In his artist statement, Crosthwaite described his renderings of Tijuana as, “Horribly real, humorously weird and often bizarre,” adding that, “there is [in Tijuana] a complicity and an acceptance that one can grow accustomed to anything as long as there is a deal to make and money to be made.” The cartoons took inspiration from Francisco Goya’s Los caprichos as well as modern street art and graffiti iconography. Tijuanerias was Crosthwaite's second exhibition at the Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, which marked the beginning of a long period of collaboration between Crosthwaite and the gallery.
CARPAS, 2013 In 2013, Crosthwaite was chosen to represent Mexico in the California-Pacific Triennial curated by Dan Cameron at the Orange County Museum of Art. The exhibition was on view from June 30 - November 17, 2013. CARPAS was a set of 26 studies that Crosthwaite sketched in preparation for the California-Pacific Triennial. Of the 26 studies, three of them went on display at the Triennial, as well as a wall mural. Carpas (the Spanish word for tent) refers to groups of travelling entertainers who performed in the 1920s-30s across Mexico and the southwestern United States, using collapsible stages and carpas to move from town to town and present programs. The central figure in carpa theater performances was called the pelado, a common person who would perform improvised satires about politics or the economy to a mixed-class audience.
The 12 x 9 foot canvases captured audiences at the Triennial. A playful combination of “nariz” (Spanish for “nose) and Arizona, La Narizona is a sketch featuring a woman with a nose extending out from her face like Pinocchio. KCRW writer Hunter Drohojowska-Brewer wrote that, “…this fearsome lady is a border patrol officer outfitted in a bikini with a face resembling that of Arizona governor Jan Brewer.” The central sketch, Miss Bala, features a young girl with a sash on and large tiara hanging over her head. A poster falls off of the wall in the background as she perches on top of a crowd of warring gunmen. The Daily Pilot reported that the image had been inspired by the true story of a beauty queen in Tijuana whose pageant was funded by drug dealers. The set of studies, drawing on real life narratives related to border communities and issues, featured the sort of political satire that had come to be characteristic of Crosthwaite’s work at this point in his career.
In 2013, Crosthwaite's work was also included in the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art’s The New World curated by Roman Stollenwerk, for which he created a 42-foot mural titled Guadalupana March.
Tijuana Radiant Shine, 2014 Tijuana Radiant Shine is a series of 14 mixed-media drawings on panel that function as visual poems, taking inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Hymn.” In Poe’s short poem, he beseeches the Virgin Mary, or Maria, to bring light after troubling times, writing, “Now, when storms of Fate o’ercast
Darkly my Present and my Past,
Let my Future radiant shine
With sweet hopes of thee and thine!”Tijuana Radiant Shine depicts the dichotomy between the hopes and realities of everyday people in Tijuana, making references to local history, mythology, technology, pop culture, and religion. The series title contrasts the parts of the city of Tijuana that shine with those parts that are darkened. Unlike Tijuanerias (2012), in which he interpreted and represented “La Leyenda Negra”, the black legend of Tijuana, Tijuana Radiant Shine attempts to dismantle this legend and the negative perspectives that comes with it. In 2014, Tijuana Radiant Shine No. 1 was awarded the Grand Prize at the FEMSA Monterrey Biennial. The Tijuana Radiant Shine series was exhibited at Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles alongside Shattered Mural in 2015.
Shattered Mural, 2015