Art News

Gilbert ‘Magu’ Lujan, Colorful and Expressive Chicano Movement Artist, Dies at 70

ARCADIA, CA (AP).- His colorful expressive works, reflecting everything from cartoonish-looking characters to Aztec warriors, would come to cover everything from the walls of subways to those of major museums during a long career that put Gilbert “Magu” Lujan at the forefront of the Chicano Art Movement. Lujan died Sunday at Methodist Hospital of Southern California. He was 70 and had suffered from cancer, said his son Naiche Starhawk Lujan. “Los Angeles has, sadly, lost a cultural icon,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday. Lujan’s style — colorful, often humorous and just as often political — sprung from the sidewalks, freeway overpasses and low-rider cars of largely Hispanic East Los Angeles in the 1970s. Like the work of such contemporaries as Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero and Beto de la Rocha, his murals and other creations have come to