Peter Rodríguez

Peter Rodríguez (born June 25, 1926 in Stockton, California ) is an American artist and founder of the Museo Mexicano in San Francisco .

biography

Rodríguez is the son of Jesús Rodriguez and Guadalupe García Rodriguez, who emigrated from Mexico to the United States in 1914. In addition to his twin brother Tony, he initially had another twelve siblings, three of whom died prematurely after the birth. He attended Burbank School, Lottie Grunsky School, and later Stockton High School in his hometown.

For the first time, pictures by Rodríguez were exhibited in a youth art competition in New York City . In 1939 he took part in the World Exhibition in San Francisco. After finishing school, he worked as a salesman and window dresser. He made several trips within the United States, and for the first time to Mexico in the 1950s, to study artists and art history. From 1954 several exhibitions followed, including in the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco. In 1955 he co-founded the Skylight Gallery in Stockton. His first exhibitions in Mexico were in 1960 in the Museo del Estado de Jalisco in Guadalajara and in the Galeria Proteo in Mexico City . In 1969 he moved to San Francisco. After he discovered during his visits to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that there were no Hispanics represented, he decided, moved by his impressions of the art visits in Mexico, to found his own museum for artists of this ethnic group. With the help of a grant from the San Francisco Foundation , the present-day Museo Mexicano was founded in 1975 , which he still heads today as museum director.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Rodriguez , Interview with Nora Wagner, October 2004.