Faculty Associate

David Avalos came of age as an artist working at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego. In 1974 he watched Mario Aguilar, recently returned from a teatro (theatre) conference in Mexico City, pick up his violin and serenade the mural he was painting next to Avalos’ on the Centro’s exterior. He learned that most Centro artists worked collaboratively and across disciplines. The ideas, impulses, and intuitions that characterize his work were nurtured there. So were his art making techniques. Avalos was never an art major and did not receive an undergraduate degree in art. In 1986 he did receive his first Visual Artist Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a number of assemblage sculptures speaking a visual patois derived from Chicano and Mexican popular, folk and tourist art. By 1988 when he left the Centro and entered the graduate program in Visual Arts at UCSD he had been involved in a number of public art and collaborative projects that had received a certain amount of national attention including the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo. He co-founded BAW/TAF, an interdisciplinary, bi-national group devoted to socially and politically engaged art. The MFA he received at UCSD led to work at California State University San Marcos where he continues to learn about the art making process from his students and colleagues.
 
David Avalos has received individual artist’s fellowships for his studio work from the National Endowment for the Arts twice, and from the California Arts Council in 1998. He is currently a Professor in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at CSU San Marcos where he has taught since 1991. He is the campus California Faculty Association Faculty Rights Chair. He lives in National City with his wife, Veronica Enrique, and his four children, Ximalatl Veronica, Tonatzopelic Matilde, Graciano Jose Ignacio, and Adrian Rafael.