RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 04.17.26 MAGO GÁNDARA’S MUJER MODERNA EXHIBIT

El Paso’s new Mexican American Cultural Center’s (MACC) exhibit, Mujer Moderna: The Life and Artwork of Mago Gándara, opened in the fall of 2025. Curated by Ramon Cardenas, the exhibition honors Margarita “Mago” Orona Gándara (1929–2018), celebrated as the first Chicana Modernist artist and the first female muralist and sculptor of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands.

On view through June 7, 2026, the show features over 100 works—including oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and personal writings by Gándara—many shown publicly for the first time. In the MACC’s second Main Gallery exhibition, the art show outlines key components “To recognize Gándara as the first ‘Chicana Modern Abstract artist in our region who broke from traditional depictions of people and nature.”

Born in El Paso during the Great Depression, Gándara first received artistic recognition in grade school for a drawing contest, and later, a supportive teacher affirmed her artistic potential during high school. After graduating in 1946, Mago pursued art studies—first at El Paso Technical School, then at Texas Western College (now UTEP)—supported by her mother’s wartime savings. Her formal art education placed her under the influence of notable instructors, including Spanish sculptor Urbici Soler, best known for his monumental Christ the King sculpture atop El Paso’s Mount Cristo Rey, symbolizing sacrifice and transcendence.

Graduating with a BFA, Mago taught art at Bowie High School in El Paso but felt constrained by family tensions. When her studio was vandalized, she determined to pursue her art independently. Mago saved money from teaching and enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949. There, she experienced artistic freedom and community for the first time, drawing inspiration from the museum’s collections and from working with nude models—an experience denied in El Paso. She pursued further studies at the Chouinard Art Institute and the University of Southern California, earning her master’s degree from Antioch College.

In Dr. George Vargas’s excellent essay on Gándara, we learned of her difficult life in postwar Chicago. She devoted all of her time to her children and seldom drew or painted. She found Chicago increasingly bleak, marked by racial tensions and personal isolation as a new mother. In 1952, Mago Orona and her family moved west in pursuit of the post-war American dream. Although she dedicated herself to raising her children, she struggled to balance family life with her passion for art.

Gándara lived in California from 1952 to 1970, and then returned to the borderlands. After her relocation to El Paso, she taught Chicano Art at El Paso Community College, where she began developing the idea of the “art warrior,” an artist guided by purpose and spiritual strength, inspired by Carlos Castañeda’s Journey to Ixtlan.

At El Paso Community College, Gándara proposed a “sculptural mural” for the new Valle Verde campus—a vision combining art, education, and desert symbolism. With determination, she secured college support, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and admission to Antioch University’s University Without Walls program to complete a master’s degree in bicultural art education. Her thesis project became the large-scale mural Time and Sand (1973–78), marking her emergence as a leader in community-based and Chicano public art.

She lived in El Paso for a decade and moved to Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city across the border from El Paso, in the mid 1980s. In Juarez, where she lived for 25 years, she transformed her home studio, CUI, into a magical creative space filled with mosaic murals, sculptures, and lush plant life.

Over time, Gándara’s artistic instincts became a means of personal liberation from a difficult marriage. Her early work included The Machineries of Hope, a nine-panel mural critiquing modern mechanization. Through these projects, Mago began transforming personal struggle into universal, humanistic art and found her voice as a woman artist.

Art Historian Dr. George Vargas described Gándara as a “Mexicanized Georgia O’Keeffe,” reflecting her powerful reinterpretation of the desert landscape and modern forms. Dr. Vargas found in her work influences from Pre-Columbian art, Byzantine mosaics, and Modernist movements from Mexico, Europe, and the United States. Ramon Cardenas noted that Gándara chose abstraction to render her imagery. She Depicted, Cardenas stated, “the border’s landscape and people through free-flowing lines, abstract forms, and color theory, to express universal human emotions of love, anger, yearning.” The oil paintings and watercolors in the exhibit reveal how she incorporated a modernist approach to landscapes and portraiture. Through abstraction, she portrayed border landscapes and family life.

One of Gándara’s best-known murals in Juarez,  El Milagro de Tepeyac(1993–present), honored the Virgin of Guadalupe and her pre-Hispanic roots as Tonantzin, the Aztec earth goddess. The mural depicted the Virgin descending from the heavens toward Juan Diego, blending Indigenous and Christian imagery — a visual metaphor for Mexican mestizo identity and spiritual fusion. Gándara funded the mural project by selling small “milagro” mosaics and drawings, transforming each purchase into a symbolic act of faith and community support.

Her perseverance and belief in collective creativity culminated in eventual grant support from Los Murales of the El Paso Junior League, enabling the completion of a mural that united artistry, spirituality, and community engagement. According to art historian Arteaga Roberto Carrillo, some of her works were influenced by Aztec themes, such as those displayed on La Avenida de los Aztecas and in the Tourist Information Center for Chamizal in Juarez.

Gándara is considered Texas’s first female muralist. Teresa Palomo wrote in the Handbook of Texas that Manuel Acosta painted Iwo Jima, perhaps the earliest of El Paso’s known Chicano murals, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars office in 1966, and that in the early 1970s, Mago Orona Gándara painted at least two murals as a solo artist, Señor Sol and Time and Sand.

The concept of border art emerges from the cultural and historical reality of the U.S.–Mexico border—an expansive, complex frontier where two nations sharply divided by wealth and politics nonetheless share intertwined cultures. This 2,000-mile region represents a dynamic space of mestizaje—the blending of Mexican and U.S. American heritages. For Latino artists, this cultural fusion inspires new forms of expression and identity beyond rigid categories of “Mexican” or “Chicano.” In 2011, Gándara relocated permanently to her Altura Street studio in central El Paso, where she continued to create until she died in 2018 at age 89.

Curator Ramon Cardenas framed Gándara as an artist who lived and worked amid the dualities and contradictions of life on the El Paso–Juárez border. The MACC exhibition reveals her as a Chicana Modern Abstract pioneer, whose groundbreaking murals and sculptures reshaped public art in the region. The exhibit presents Gándara as a Border Art Warrior, whose art fosters community cohesion and offers a shared vision of cultural unity, turning creativity into both a survival strategy and a form of resistance.

Admission is free, with MACC open Wednesday through Saturday (10 a.m.–6 p.m.) and Sunday (11 a.m.–3 p.m.).

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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated above.