Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, February 12, 2022: Rubén Ortiz Torres, a Mexican photographer, painter, sculptor, film and video producer (#1495)

Rubén Ortiz Torres (1964) is a Mexican photographer, painter, sculptor, film and video producer.

He was the subject of the mid-career survey show Desmothernismo at the Huntington Beach Art Center, a show which toured to the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte in Mexico City. His low-rider/video installation "Alien Toy" was shown as part of the InSite show in San Diego in 1997 then in 1998 at Track 16 in Los Angeles. He co-directed the feature-length experimental documentary Frontierland with Jesse Lerner in 1995.

Ortiz is currently a Faculty Member in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Ortiz publishes a blog entitled For The Record.

Rubén Ortiz Torres is an artist whose work spans a variety of mediums. Since the early 1980s, he has produced a wide-ranging body of work and is associated with the development of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Ortiz Torres's 2000 Grants to Artists award supported the development of a body of work titled The Adoration of the Magi (2000). It is a series of photographs taken in Mexico City that depicts the extravagant photography booths set up in Mexico City's Alameda Park after Christmas. Street photographers compete to create the most baroque scenes for children to take photos with the Magi. Ortiz Torres is seen with his camera in many of the images.

He has participated in several international exhibitions and film festivals. His work is now in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Artpace, San Antonio; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; and Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City.

Prior to receiving his 2000 FCPA grant, Ortiz Torres moved to Los Angeles in 1990 on a Fulbright Foundation Scholarship. He had also received grants from the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture (1993), the Banff Center for the Arts (1995), the Andrea Frank Foundation (1997), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1999).

Ortiz Torres studied architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and art at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. He received his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1992. He has been on permanent faculty in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego since 2001.

Rubén Ortiz Torres explores the social and aesthetic transformations related to cross-cultural exchange and globalization. A plurality of parallel strategies spring from the various media he explores. His work is often centered around adaptation processes in specific and widely varied contexts and the subsequent transformations that they invoke—as signs and objects that constantly change their shape and meaning. The work of Ortiz Torres includes painting, photograph, video, collage, multimedia, and commercial products that range from baseball caps to pick-up trucks, all of which question the veneration of the art object and the degradation of folk culture and the vernacular.
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