Jesse Dominguez: Artist & Traveler

Jesse Dominguez was born in 1957, in Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico. He studied at Kansas City Art Institute, received a BA from Baker University, and an MFA in painting from Yale School of Art. Dominguez taught at Hampton University, and later at Central Michigan University, before retiring to Leavenworth, Kansas. His travels have taken him through Europe, The Americas, North Africa and Central Asia

Throughout his career in higher education, Dominguez led study-abroad programs to museums and cultural destinations around Western Europe, while maintaining cultural and familial ties with the country of his birth. During the 1990s, Dominguez produced a series of landscapes of sites located within Colonial Williamsburg, as well as indigenous ball-courts at Monte Alban, Oaxaca, and other archaeological sites in Mexico. Having emigrated to the U.S.A from the age of three, displacement prevents him from beholding his native landscape with purely Mexican eyes, at the same time denying him a Norteamericano perspective. Belonging neither to one homeland nor the other proved useful to Dominguez, during his recent travels to such non-western regions as North Africa and Central Asia. Read his statement below:

During his peregrinations across Western Europe, Dominguez focused his attention on religious buildings, inviting comparison between the Baroque façades of Italy and Iberia, and Churrigueresco Spanish-Colonial architecture. Dominguez’s anthropophagic consumption of European monuments might be regarded as a kind of reverse-colonialism. By digesting Eurocentric tropes, such as Grand Tour watercolors and German Romanticism, Dominguez envisions his own pictorial mestisaje, as an artist whose forebears overcame conquest, colonialism, emigration, and displacement.

Artworks by Jesse Dominguez can be found in private and public collections including:

Hampton University Museum. Hampton, Virginia\
Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. Kansas City, Missouri
Spencer Museum of Art. Lawrence, Kansas
Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven, Connecticut

Jesse Dominguez (center) with a school group in Samarkand, Uzbekistan