Manuel Unzueta Artworks

Art of Conviction and Cultural Concern

With the latest international demand for American Art with a Latin touch, now serious collectors can include the art of Manuel Unzueta, an artist who has been creating exciting art for the last 25 years. Based in Santa Barbara, California, Unzueta has produced a vast number of artworks that include exciting colorful murals with philosophical implications. Paintings and drawings that highlight a diverse concern for culture and modernism.

Unzueta, has shown his art in and outside of the USA and has received important recognition for his humanistic concerns and aesthetic innovations. In 1975 he earned his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California and excites the crowds when he shares his work in campuses and institutions around the country.

The art of Manuel Unzueta is a human preoccupation as well as great concern for esthetic searching.   Whether he paints a huge mural with significant aspects of Hispanic culture or a small painting of vivid Sarape colors, his total involvement with art is inevitable.  His recent series of bright Sarape arrangements as well as his fascination with mestizo faces makes those canvases explode with vibrant energy of unlimited color combinations and beauty.  But Unzueta's preoccupation with art does not end with the representation of the images he creates.  He introduces a mystical touch heavily rooted in his Mexican Southwestern influences.

In many of his murals, Manuel Unzueta introduces us to the world of the human concerns by which he lives, while many of his smaller canvases offer us a more personal touch.  This commitment to community ideals has ultimately encouraged him to share his visions of art and human concerns in educational forums.

Since the late 1960’s Manuel Unzueta has been a prolific artist, creating many fascinating series of artworks and exhibitions, which have been warmly embraced by the public.  Since his early drawings of tormented figures influenced by Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, his Chicano murals expressed that tendency and, his more colorful work of the late 1970’s, and his recent cultural concern, Unzueta has grown in exposure and maturity.

A native of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, Unzueta was raised both in his native city and in El Paso, Texas.  During his youth, Unzueta moved to Santa Barbara, California where he completed his Baccalaureate degree in Art and Master of Fine Arts in Painting at the University of California.