Israel Campos

Israel Campos is an interdisciplinary Los Angeles-based Chicano artist whose work in mokuhanga, painting, digital media, and artist books draws on Mesoamerican art traditions to explore how historical events reverberate into the present. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011 and received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015.

Campos's artistic practice blends pre-Columbian iconography, generational myths, oral folklore, and contemporary pop culture to collapse the centuries separating different art forms and cultural moments. His work embraces the art traditions stretching from Mesoamerica through the present, creating visual narratives that investigate identity, queerness, and cultural continuity within Chicano experience.

As founder of Chayote Press, named in honor of his grandmother who is affectionately called Chayito, Campos has established a studio space in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles dedicated to providing artists with facilities for print media work. Through Chayote Press, he teaches printmaking courses, making print media accessible to artists from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Campos exhibited at the International Mokuhanga Conference juried exhibition in Nara (2021), representing one of the rare Latin American connections within the international mokuhanga community. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Kohler Art Library in Madison, Wisconsin, the University of California Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives, and the Wright Museum of Art in Beloit, Wisconsin, among other institutions.