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Eduardo Carrillo (April 8, 1937 – July 14, 1997) was a Mexican American artist in Chicano Movement who worked for the advancement of Chicano artists, culture, and civil rights. He was known for his paintings and murals which drew upon his extensive study of European art and Mexican art and history. While his formative technical skill was rooted in his study and appreciation of western European Renaissance art and Mannerism painters, his time spent living in Baja California also educated him in indigenous peoples art-making techniques and philosophies. The scope of his subject matter spanned Surrealism-inspired landscapes, the intersection of Mexican history and myth and Chicano cultural identity, figurative and portrait paintings, traditional landscapes, and still lifes. In 1982, at a time in history when Chicano culture had been engaged with cultural reclamation and identification for over a decade, Carrillo organized the groundbreaking conference Califas: Chicano Art and Culture in California, which brought together artists, cultural workers, art historians, and educators to look at the contributions of Chicano art from 1965 to 1981.
In 1955, Carrillo attended Los Angeles City College, where he received an award from the art department, then the following year transferred to University of California, Los Angeles. His instructors included William Brice, Jack Hooper, Mary Holmes, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Stanton Macdonald-Wright recalled spending "whole afternoons with Eddie, as he was called, talking to him about paintings." Carrillo credited Brice with introducing him to the work of the great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The 1957 exhibition German Expressionist Painting held at Pomona College, curated by Peter Selz, had a significant impact on L.A. artists. Two years later, in 1959, the Ceeje Gallery was founded. The majority of the artists the represented by Ceeje were young and enrolled in the masters' of arts program at UCLA. Many of Carrillo's fellow Ceeje artists such as Charles Garabedian, Roberto Chavez, Louie Lunetta, Lance Richbourg, Arleen Goldberg, Aron Goldberg, and Les Biller were influenced by the German expressionists Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel. Carrillo and his Cejee Gallery contemporaries were inspired by the possibilities of invented narratives, non-pictorial space and aggressive brushwork they found in the work of the German Expressionists, differing from the dominant influence of abstract expressionist and pop artists in America during this time.
UCLA instructor Mary Holmes was a supportive influence and lifelong friend of Carrillo and encourage him to pursue a grant to study in Spain. He continued working and in 1960 paid for his own travel to Spain. While studying abroad in Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes and at the Prado Museum, he analyzed works by Hieronymus Bosch, Diego Velázquez, El Greco, and other European Renaissance and Mannerism. He practiced replicating these masters' oil painting glazing techniques in his efforts to understand their manipulation of light and its luminescence. In 1960, he created a copy of a likely follower of Bosch's The Temptation of Saint Anthony from c. 1500–1525 .
Upon returning to the United States, Carrillo's paintings continued to show his interest in surrealistic spatial construction and are noted for a heightened stillness often associated with Giorgio de Chirico's work. In 1964, Carrillo painted the four evangelists in the style of El Greco for the pendentive in the Mission of San Ignacio de Kadakamen, San Ignacio, Baja California Sur.
In 1966, he was awarded a grant from the Copley Foundation, San Diego to found a regional center for art in La Paz, Baja California. He and his first wife Sheila embarked on hiring craftsmen to teach traditional arts and crafts using indigenous materials and methods. A shop was established to sell the products and to provide economic support to the community.
Carrillo had a natural gift for teaching and was appointed as an assistant professor at San Fernando State College, Northridge in 1969. The following year he joined the faculty of Sacramento State College, then was recruited to the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1972. During his tenure at UCSC teaching studio painting, watercolors, and drawing, Carrillo's classes also included group mural painting, hand-built ceramics for which he and his students personally dug local clay, and art history courses on Mexican art that included his extensive original research. As a teacher, he was known for his emotional and intellectual engagement with his students; his inspiration in their own work reverberated throughout and influenced their careers. He was connected to the founding of Oakes College and , and taught at University of California, Santa Cruz for twenty-five years until his death of cardiac arrest in 1997.
He was a leader in the Chicano mural painting movement in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Throughout his lifetime, he created a diverse array of paintings in oil and watercolor. His paintings are held in private collections and museums in the United States.
He was married twice and had four children. He died in 1997 in Tijuana and was buried in his maternal ancestral homeland of San Ignacio.
The Eduardo Carrillo Gallery was dedicated in his honor at UCSC for senior student exhibitions.
Museo Eduardo Carrillo was created posthumously and is the only Artist-Endowed Foundation in the United States devoted to the work of a Mexican-American artist.
Carrillo's interpretation of the contemporary rebels in their urban environment is shown on the left, whereas a rural scene on the right was set against a field of corn and depicts farmers, gatherers, and indigenous people. In concert, the totality of the scene conveys the emergence of Mexicans from Spanish dominion and honors their ancestral right of independence.
In Las Tropicanas, the imprint of Bosch's use of disjointed and compressed space and the Mannerists use of forced perspective can be seen in Carrillo's composition composed of an amalgamation of subjects intersecting and converging: mythical figures, glowing tattooed figures, nude female figures rendered with naturalistic attention —one splayed on a balcony grasps and points an arrow from a bow — neon-hued skeletons stacked in a pyramid, a UFO that hovers in the upper right, an enormous rainbow-plumed hummingbird, an emerald green Iguana coiled tightly in the center, modern-day buildings with cast-iron railings merged with pyramids that abut a massive windowless structure detailed in "X" patterns, a menacing feline baring its fangs and poised to attack is threateningly just visible through a balcony trellis, a small Grecian vase is placed strategically at the base of a pillar, a tortoise and orb all co-exist. Bodies, architecture, animals, foreground, background, myth and reality are compressed in fantastical spatial balance. Carrillo referenced David Alfaro Siqueiros's "depth of space" as a major influence on Las Tropicanas.
The hummingbird can be seen as the reincarnation of Huītzilōpōchtli the Aztecs god of sun and war. In Carrillo's composition, the perspective of the bird is rendered in a scale disproportionate to reality thus making it equivalent to the size of a large section of the night sky. This use of scale emphasizes the strength and power of the creature thereby intentionally invoking these same qualities associated with mythical warriors. Carrillo incorporated images derived from Mexico's pre-conquest art that he believed still held aesthetic power for Mexicans and their descendants in the United States. Carrillo stated:
I tried to introduce themes that seemed to be more Mexican than anything else. I had skeletons in this painting. Prior to this time, even way back in the 1960s, I was already painting skulls and so forth, but this was coming out of the Spanish tradition or the Flemish use of skulls. It was trying to bring together what I had learned in Spain and what I had learned in Mexico. It was a major step for me.Glowing linework and patterns illuminate surfaces and the figures of women, animals, and skeletons against a blue-black night sky. Their tattoos, scales, and bones glimmer, jewel-like, against flesh and flattened architecture in a scene depicting simultaneous realities of violence, passivity, offerings, power, history, and contemporaneous time in an imaginative invention of space.
With permission, and with friends and students from his university classes, the artist spent eight months painting every surface "out of pure love to humanity." Carrillo considered the space sacred. The mural depicted a crucified Indio, identified by a symbol on his solar plexus as the Maize God, a Mesoamerica symbol of the gift of life that dies in Winter. Above Indio, a dark cloud that framed a grimacing figure on a diagonal cross was Quetzalcoatl: who sacrificed himself to give birth to the Maize God to feed the people.The space was filled with imagery of sacrifice, death, and rebirth.
The once unremarkable thoroughfare had been transformed into a color-infused and spiritually enlivened destination that through its art became a popular destination for musicians, artists, hippies, tourists, and the homeless. Without warning, the building's manager ordered the work destroyed; it was painted out overnight in 1979. As Shafira M. Goldman observed, "The loss was a cautionary tale documented in the history of mural paintings."
Over forty years later, the Califas Legacy Project continues its work focusing on the art and ideas of our region's Chicano/a/x and Latinx creative leaders, the elders in the movement, and the next generation of artists.
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