August 21, 2027–January 23, 2028
The San Diego Museum of Art presents a major Hugo Crosthwaite retrospective, accompanied by the first museum publication on the artist. The exhibition opens August 21, 2027, and runs through January 23, 2028.
Crosthwaite’s multidisciplinary approach explores the San Diego–Tijuana border region with timeless humanism. His work regularly includes humorous references to popular culture, cinema, and comics, as well as haunting themes of violence, abuse of power, and the traumas of migration. The exhibition includes drawings, paintings, murals, stop-motion animation films, floor installations, artist books, and personal sketchbooks.
Two major paintings recently acquired by SDMA from Crosthwaite’s Tijuacolor series—a body of work whereby he merges the media of drawing and painting—are included in the exhibition: La Anunciación (2024), which gives a modern interpretation to the biblical event of the Annunciation, depicting a young woman receiving a message from the archangel Gabriel on her mobile phone, and La Línea (2024). The title La Línea has multiple meanings: it refers to the line separating the United States and Mexico, to people lining up daily to enter the United States, as well as to a line of cultural history. The faces in this work are drawn from sketches of Tijuana residents and carry on the Mexican tradition of ex-voto paintings, in which individuals are dramatically situated within their vows, true stories, and miracles, as icons of resilience.
Recipient of the 2019 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition award, Crosthwaite expands the conventional expectation of portraiture by providing life stories that unfold through the medium of stop-motion animation, as with A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez (2018), which documents an immigrant’s experience crossing the border into the United States, and A Portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci (2022), which addresses Dr. Fauci’s dedication to resolving two of the gravest health crises in recent history: the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hugo Crosthwaite holds a BFA from San Diego State University. His works are included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The San Diego Museum of Art; Boca Raton Museum of Art; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; and CECUT/Centro Cultural Tijuana. A dual citizen of the US and Mexico, he was born in 1971 in Tijuana, and lives and works between Rosarito, Baja California, and San Diego.
Featured at top right: Hugo Crosthwaite, La Línea (detail), 2024. Acrylic and color pencil on canvas. 2025.43. © Hugo Crosthwaite
