Biography

Alejandro Santiago was a Mexican artist whose works employed color and expressive forms to convey both his imagination and spiritual views. He is best known for his project 2,501 Migrants (2007), in which the artist sculpted life-sized clay figurines to symbolize migrants who had left his small town of Teococuilco for the United States. Born on April 22, 1964 in Teocouilco de Marcos Perez, Mexico, he studied with the painter Rufino Tamayo in the city of Oaxaca. By the early 1990s, Santiago had already been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions at galleries in Mexico and abroad. In 2001, after having spent three years in Paris, he returned to his hometown, where he was struck by the number of people that had left for America. Inspired by their path, Santiago decided to take the journey himself and illegally crossed the border into the United States. He was subsequently caught, but the experience became an integral part of his practice, leading him to produce his most famous work. The artist died at the age of 49 on July 22, 2013 in Oaxaca, Mexico.