Daniel Barragán makes paintings and sculptures that question the value of land, labor, and identity. By combining cultural signifiers with American abstractions and symbols, Barragán creates “hieroglyphs” that question the preservation and displacement of his own Chicano heritage. Barragán’s hometown of El Paso, Texas is a border city that resides on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande river. Juarez, Mexico in on the opposite side. This river that once fed, cleaned, and stabilized a single community is now a concrete division of two neighboring countries. With these complex histories in mind Barragán creates a visual lexicon of images that disrupt the new American landscape and raises questions of cultural representation, ownership, assimilation, and sexual identity. Barragán imagines an excavation site where markers are used to extract land and artifact from their original resting place. When these ideas and images are unearthed their history’s become skewed and they inherit new names and identities. In Barragán’s work, history, artifact, and popular culture collide to create their own hybrid visualization with celebration and representation at its core.

Barragán was born in 1988 in El Paso, TX, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited in group shows throughout New York and Texas and has curated several exhibitions including Down to Earth at Head Hi, NY (2019). Barragán was the recipient of the Stutzman Family Foundation Fellowship (2019). He received a BFA (2013) and an MFA (2019) from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.