Javier Chavira is an artist who has no misgivings about creating images that straddle the line between realism and abstraction. He is equally at home with the technical rigor of academic tradition and the liberating nature of formalism. A prolific artist, Javier has exhibited nationally and internationally and his work is in numerous public and private collections. Aside from being an active artist, Javier is also an educator. He is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Governors State University, a position he’s held since 2003. Javier is represented by 33 Contemporary Gallery, Chicago and currently resides in Crown Point, Indiana with his wife Sarah and their daughter Paloma.

Today, the National Museum of Mexican Art stands out as one of the most prominent first-voice institutions for Mexican art and culture in the United States. We are home to one of the country’s largest Mexican art collections, including more than 7,000 seminal pieces from ancient Mexico to the present.

As the only Latino museum accredited by American Alliance of Museums, we recognize our unique responsibility to present exhibitions of artistic and cultural value and to deliver high-quality education that demonstrates the breadth and depth of Mexican art, culture and history.

Twenty of our exhibitions have traveled across the United States and six have traveled to Mexico.  Landmark exhibitions that have traveled include The Art of the Other Mexico (1992), Maria Izquierdo (1996), The African Presence in Mexico (2006), and Frida's Contemporaries: Women Artists of Modern Mexico (2007).

Joe McGee - "Frida and the Agave Plant", Mixed Media on Paper, 29 x 25 inches, 2014

WWFD? (What Would Frida Do?) ...in art, if she were alive today? How would she respond in creative terms to our post-modern, post-industrial, post-colonial world, to the frenzy of stimuli emitted from post-pc gadgetry, and to the arbitrariness of post-identity representation? Of course it is impossible to give a clear answer to this hypothetical, since Frida is no longer with us. Yet the question is not entirely out of reach. And by raising it we are brought to the heart of her artistic project, as we consider the spirit in which she thought about her circumstances and formulated her thinking in works of art.

Contrary to what you may have heard, Frida's distinctiveness is not found in her creative technique and process, nor in the subject matter she portrayed, nor even in the intense personal feelings she lived through and recorded. It lies rather in her representation of the self—specifically her own self—within the context or frame of collective experience. Again and again her paintings disclose elements of an inner being cast against the background of an outer world of social life, political and economic activity, familial and personal relations, and shared symbolic codes. The art plunges relentlessly inward, ever more toward the dense center of her private existence, while at the same time reaching outward to touch the universal human condition. The self is placed in dialogue with the social surround, sometimes reflecting metaphorically upon it, sometimes caught in vexatious discord with it, sometimes shaped by it, and sometimes standing opposite in stubborn refusal. 

WWFD? At Swanson Contemporary, artists Mari Mujica, Jacque Parsley, Diane Kahlo, Joe McGee and Pilar Acevedo join in celebrating the inspirational force of Frida's art and life. As independent creators they look upon the world of today with fresh eyes, their very own eyes. However they have been spurred by the exhibition to abide for a moment within Frida's spirit of inquiry, and perhaps to reflect more intently and more imaginatively on their selves and their circumstances.