A conversation with a deported Mexican immigrant he met on the streets of Tijuana became a stop-motion animation art piece that won artist Hugo Crosthwaite first prize in “The Outwin: American Portraiture,” a Smithsonian exhibition featured at the Springfield Museums.

Works from the triennial’s fifth edition, including Crosthwaite’s stop-motion drawing animation, “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez,” can still be viewed online at portraitcompetition.si.edu. The Outwin 2019 will also travel to the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield Museums, Massachusettes (October 3, 2020–April 4, 2021) and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. (September 10, 2020–January 23, 2022). 

“The art produced by Mexican and Mexican American artists in the U.S. has a long history that continues to reverberate–this echo is a dynamic and necessary narrative that expands traditional interpretations of American art,” said Amy Galpin, Chief Curator at the museum. Artist Hugo Crosthwaite, whose paintings are featured in the exhibit, was born in Tijuana, Mexico and the cultural aesthetics are influenced with his crossing of the border between Mexico and the United States. The subject matter he paints is inspired by the novel A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande. 

Greetings from the timeless void of quarantine, where we all feel like astronauts who have been in space just a little too long. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, with your essential guide to all things arts — and operatic krumping. On Instagram, I’ve been very much enjoying Hugo Crosthwaite’s stop motion animations of his quarantine drawings.

Hugo Crosthwaite, the 2019 first place winner was recognized for a stop-motion animated drawing. “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez” (2018) depicts a young woman from Tijuana and explores her pursuit of the American dream. The animated video project is part of a series based on oral histories Crosthwaite has gathered at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Every three years, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery showcases finalists of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, named for a late benefactor. A total of 46 works are on display from the latest edition, selected last year by a panel of jurors from more than 2,600 submissions, all from American artists who were instructed to respond “to the current political and social context.” Hugo Crosthwaite’s A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, a three-minute video of stop-motion animation, took First Prize.

Hugo Crosthwaite's La Güera, 2018, is featured in the "Readings" section of Harper's Magazine in print in January 2020.

...The selection includes far more photographs and videos than paintings and drawings, although some entries blur those categories. The top prize went to Hugo Crosthwaite for a series of black-and-white drawings, animated into a video, of Berenice Sarmiento Chavez. She is a young Mexican woman who ventured north across the border in search of the American Dream, but has since been deported. The artist encountered her in Tijuana. As winner of the top prize, Crosthwaite will be commissioned to do an official portrait. The 2016 winner, Amy Sherald, made a painting of Michelle Obama that became one of the gallery’s most popular attractions.

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., named Hugo Crosthwaite the 2019 winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, an astute selection for several reasons. Crosthwaite’s entry, a meditative, three-minute stop-motion animation about a woman migrating from Mexico to the United States, stretched the conventional bounds of portraiture and affirmed the genre’s relevance, both of which are aims of the prize. Over nearly two decades, Crosthwaite has applied portraiture’s concentrated attention not only to individuals but even more avidly to place.

The title of this year’s winning work, by Hugo Crosthwaite, tells us the name of the person represented in the artist’s three-minute stop-motion animation of black-and-white drawings. It is A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, a young woman from Tijuana, Mexico, who is seeking a better life in the United States. Her face emerges from a blank space, like a piece of paper or canvas, and then we watch as her body is sketched in, as though she’s materialized from nothing. In a series of brief vignettes, we learn about the danger that she, like other migrants, has faced, including violence and sexual harassment.

The new exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles by Mexican-American artist Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971) grabs your attention the moment you walk into the gallery. The artist, who lives and works in San Diego and Rosarito, Mexico, created a monumental, 27-foot wide multi-panel work called Death March. Multiple human figures and skeletons compose a funeral march, appearing to honor the deceased in a manner that calls to mind Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead.

For painter and video artist Hugo Crosthwaite, life has unfolded in equal parts on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and he has come to understand that in a way the border region itself is its own nation, with a unique culture that is both blended and divided, and a population comfortable with dualities. Both his films and graphite and ink drawings on canvas—often at monumental scale—exist in a black-and-white palette and are rich with regal, stylized detail.

The painter is showing a new series of drawings, panel paintings and animations that chart the ebb and flow of humanity, along with unseen magical phenomena, in the U.S.-Mexico-border region where he lives and works. (The artist divides his time between Rosarito and San Diego.) Crosthwaite, a painter whose work is as influenced by comic books as it is by Gustav Doré, recentlywon the top prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwi Boocheyer Portrait Competion, pays tributes to Goya’s Caprichos. A recent series capturing grotesqueries and folly.

The video begins with the sound of a guitar strumming and a voice singing in Spanish. The main character is sketched quickly, beginning with her eyes, then face, hair and shoulders. She gazes into the distance. Over the course of the three-minute stop-motion drawing animation video, we watch as the main character goes about her life, immigrating to the United States and trying to succeed in her new country.

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has announced the winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, a triannual contest honoring artists that “challenge the definition of portraiture.” Hugo Crosthwaite, a San Diego-based artist, will take home the $25,000 prize, which also comes with a commission to create a new portrait for the museum’s permanent collection.Crosthwaite follows in the footsteps of now-veritable art star Amy Sherald, who won the last Boochever award in 2016.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced that artist Hugo Crosthwaite has been named the first-prize winner of the fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which aims to reflect the contemporary state of portraiture in the United States. Recognized for his stop-motion drawing animation A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, 2018, Crosthwaite is the first Latinx artist to receive the $25,000 award since the national competition was founded in 2006. Following in the footsteps of Amy Sherald, the previous winner of the prize, the San Diego–based artist will receive a commission to create a portrait of a living individual for the National Gallery’s collection. 

Portraiture is due for a reframing. Although the art form has traditionally served to memorialize the affluent and the powerful, the finalists of the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition point to a future where portraits empower the disenfranchised. The triennial competition, founded in 2006 by an endowment from the late Virginia Outwin Boochever, calls for artists to “challenge the definition of portraiture.” First-prize winner Hugo Crosthwaite does just that. His 2018 stop-motion animation, A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, illustrates one woman’s journey from Tijuana, Mexico, to the United States.

Public art is the icing on the cake in the transformation of Liberty Station from a formal, staid Navy training center into a vibrant entertainment, shopping and arts destination. This year, six artists participated in Installations at the Station, the NTC Foundation’s public art program, which will continue next year. This year’s projects included community-painted skateboards representing a wave and a ship on a rooftop, a braided rope bench inspired by the native tribes and the Navy and murals of border scenes by Tijuana artist Hugo Crosthwaite as part of an ongoing narrative in multiple locations that started in 2009.

Danica Phelps draws with uncommon grace. Her line moves with liquid ease, following the momentum of time. It describes what happens in her life, and it also makes things happen. As her beautifually affirming show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles attests, her line has agency. 

Hugo Crosthwaite's small drawings line the front gallery's walls at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.  A jig saw puzzle of catholic school girls, nudies, saints, tattoos, and ghosts fill the pieces that are excerpts of life in Tijuana.  Many of the scenes are positioned like movie stills, a young girl could be walking off of a surreal set, or she's unwittingly walked into another dimension.  It's cartoonish and seedy, and the spaces where people linger could be the backside of a carnival.  

Though physically immersive, the installation is, paradoxically, less viscerally compelling than the small, discrete works, but still plenty invigorating. Throughout Crosthwaite's work, lust and violence are tempered by grace; tradition embraces surprise.  Acts of witness marry feats of imagination, and a crazy equilibrium makes it all hang together.

 

Throughout the exhibition, Crosthwaite’s work proves haunting or political, cartoonish or literal, showing the depth of his ability and classical training. At times, it feels as if these are bad dreams made real, with surreal moments interspersed amongst more realistic ones. In “Twins,” Crosthwaite explores the inherent censorship and loss of freedom following 9/11 by depicting a man’s fist in the mouth of another in the foreground of the New York skyline.

“Brutal Beauty,” the title of the museum show, captures well the tight conflation of tough and tender in Crosthwaite’s work. An element of violence threads through it, whether in the bruised bodies and flayed skin in Bartolomé (2004), or the guns within reach of the protagonists in A Tail for Two Cities, a large drawing completed on site at the museum, pitting characters representing Tijuana and San Diego in threatening but slightly comical confrontation. As an observer of people and his native city, Crosthwaite seems almost devotional. He doesn’t glamorize or idealize either, but reveres their humble familiarity, their vitality and authenticity. In many of the drawings, Tijuana appears as a cluttered sprawl of rooftops, electrical wires, billboards and other signage, its inhabitants thick-bodied and plain-faced.

Hugo Crosthwaite’s La Cola de dos Ciudades, (A Tale of Two Cities), (2010), and Bartolomé, (2004), are the dominant works of “Brutal Beauty,” his current show at SDMA. La Cola de dos Ciudades, inspired by Crosthwaite’s birthplace Tijuana, highlights conflict between Tijuana and San Diego. Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities, Goya’s Duel with Cudgels and Kahlo’s The Two Fridas provided source material. The drawing features two anguished males depicted in a graphic/Pop Art style influenced by Crosthwaite’s recent years in New York and DC comics. Crosthwaite is a superb draftsman, and the fact that he created this work in three weeks in front of an audience is a feat. 

One of the images that stuck to me as I started drawing yesterday, I just did a face, it came into my head an image of Goya's black paintings – there's this painting of these two figures, these two brothers, clubbing each other to death and their sinking. And I thought that could be the image that I'm doing here, two figures having a narrative, there's this duality to them, they're either reconciling or in conflict. 

Hugo Crosthwaite’s three graphite drawings fuse character and cartoon, idiosyncratic identity and flat graphic energy. In one of the intriguing snapshots, a man lightly fingers a frog; in another, a half-naked woman in character-cluttered undershorts glances back at us as she inks a large tattoo.

Crosthwaite's world of violence, poverty, furtive sex and tedium gathers power from the tension between the gritty vision and the beauty and grace of his draftsmanship. His sure line, the subtlety of light and shade and finely rendered details create a sense of reality so vivid you forget that it is in black and white.