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Great Lives from History: Latinos

Alfredo M. Arreguín

by Bruce E. Johansen

Mexican-born artist

Arreguín is a highly regarded painter whose work reflects the influence of his Mexican heritage and life in the Pacific Northwest. He originated the “Pattern and Decoration” style, in which intricately designed, brilliantly colored images overlay complex background designs.

Areas of achievement: Art

Early Life

Born in Morelia, Mexico in 1935, Alfredo Mendoza Arreguín (AH-reh-GEEN) moved to Mexico City at the age of thirteen. As a youth, Arreguín lived with his mother in his grandparents’ household. After his grandparents’ deaths, the Dam family (whom he had met when they had visited Mexico) offered him a home in Seattle. At age twenty-one, Arreguín moved to Seattle, where he earned a bachelor’s degree (in 1967) and a master of fine arts degree (in 1969) at the University of Washington. He then became a major player in the growing Latino artistic presence in the Pacific Northwest. Arreguín was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1984.

Life’s Work

In 1979, Arreguín represented the United States and won the Palm of the People Award at the eleventh International Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980. Nine years later, competing against more than two hundred other artists, he won a commission to design a poster for the Centennial Celebration of Washington State. In 1988, Arreguín designed the official White House Easter egg. In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art acquired his triptych Sueño (Dream: Eve Before Adam) (1992). A year later, in 1995, Arreguín was honored by the Mexican government with an Ohtli Award, its most distinguished accolade for expatriates who contribute to Mexican culture.

Arreguín also exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s show “Framing Memory: Portraiture Now.” One of his paintings, The Return to Aztlán (2006), was added to the gallery’s permanent collection. His work also is part of the permanent collection of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., as well as many other local and regional archives.

In Patterns of Dreams and Nature (2007), Lauro Flores, chair and professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington, described Arreguín as an American painter in a truly hemispheric sense, an artist of magic, mystery, and revelation whose place in the history of North American art is secure. Flores’s anthology The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature, received an American Book Award in 1999.

According to Flores, Arreguín draws inspiration from designs on Mexican ceramics, textiles, and wood handicrafts, as well as the art of the Olmec, Aztec, and Maya, while tapping his North American environment as well. From the Northwest, he has borrowed snow-capped mountains, seascapes, rushing streams, salmon runs, birds, and rainforests. His 1981 painting La Push evokes a sunset on Washington’s Pacific coast. The effect of the sunset, like many of Arreguin’s works, is nearly hypnotic.

Like that of many accomplished artists, Arreguín’s work is a cultural mosaic, even incorporating Japanese and Korean themes on occasion. He became acquainted with these Asian styles while serving in the U.S. military during the Korean War. Tess Gallagher, a poet, short story writer, and essayist in Port Angeles, Washington, who has known Arreguín more than thirty years, and Raymond Carver, Gallagher’s late husband, professed admiration of Arreguín’s work, finding it rich in imagination, and open to multiple interpretations. The complexity of his work demands attention. As Gallagher describes it, his paintings burst with “butterflies, parrots and red berries, baboons and iguana, tendrils and primordial eyes emerging from indigo leaves.”

As of 2011, Arreguín continues to live in Seattle. His wife and daughter also are artists.

Significance

An originator of the “Pattern and Decoration” style of art, Arreguín produces works composed of intricate designs in brilliant colors overlaying complex backgrounds with deep, rich, multilayered landscapes and other imagery drawn from Mexican rainforests and Pacific Northwest terrain, among other themes. He paints these intricate works with a very small brush. His twentieth anniversary poster for El Centro de la Raza uses the image of a horse that appears to gallop over an undulating background pattern of reds and blues. He also has used Japanese printmaking techniques in creating portraits of Latino historical figures, such as artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and activist César Chávez.

Political and environmental activism are evident in Arreguín’s Sacrificio na Amazonia (1989), with its homage to Chico Mendes, a Brazilian rubber worker and organizer who was killed in 1988 in Brazil’s Amazon jungle. Mendes appears in Arreguin’s work defiant of death. In Siete Leguas (1991), Arreguín brings to life a legendary horse ridden by Emiliano Zapata when he was killed in an ambush during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The riderless horse escaped to the mountains and became a mythical symbol of Zapata’s irrepressible spirit.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Johansen, Bruce E. "Alfredo M. Arreguín." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240004701001.

APA 7th

Johansen, B. E. (2012). Alfredo M. Arreguín. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Johansen, Bruce E. "Alfredo M. Arreguín." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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