Álvaro Márquez - prints and biography

Biography

Álvaro D. Márquez is a visual artist and part-time professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. His multidisciplinary practice spans printmaking, drawing, installation, and research-based projects, all unified by a commitment to social inquiry. Central to his work is an examination of displacement across the Americas—beginning with the dispossession of Indigenous peoples during European conquest and extending to contemporary issues of migration, gentrification, and homelessness.

Born into the working-class migrant community of East Salinas, California, Márquez comes from three generations of migrant farm workers. This background profoundly informs his artistic and academic pursuits, grounding them in lived experience and a deep awareness of community struggles. His prints and installations often merge figurative storytelling with the visual grammar of comics, allowing him to explore narratives of resilience and survival with immediacy and clarity.

Among his most notable projects is the series Al Norte y P’atras (North and Back), which tells the story of an undocumented Mexican farmer’s migration journey through a sequence of twelve hand-embellished linocuts. This work embodies Márquez’s ability to use printmaking as both historical record and vehicle for contemporary commentary.

Márquez has exhibited widely across California and beyond. His solo show Intersections (2020–2021) at Self Help Graphics & Art in Los Angeles presented installations that mapped histories of displacement in the Los Angeles Basin. He was also the ESMoA LAB Residency recipient for the project FREESTATE (2020–2021), which explored notions of freedom and constraint in the American context. In 2025, his work will be featured in Recuerdos Ilustrados: Día de los Muertos at the California Museum.

In addition, Márquez has contributed to collaborative projects such as the Utopia/Dystopia portfolio (2019), curated by Miyo Stevens-Gandara, and created the widely recognized print Your Presence Counts / Tu Presencia Cuenta (2020), now part of the Self Help Graphics permanent collection. His works are also represented on Artsy and housed in private and institutional collections.

Through art, teaching, and research, Márquez continues to interrogate the politics of identity and belonging. His practice bridges past and present, creating visual narratives that honor community histories while engaging urgent contemporary issues.