Emilio Amero Archives

Hispanic Heritage Month 2025: Explore works from talented artists at SAM

Sara Butler on Oct 8 2025

Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! This annual celebration—recognized between September 15 and October 15—honors the contributions and influence of Hispanic and Latinx Americans to the history, culture, and achievements of the United States. In honor of the holiday, we’re spotlighting four Hispanic and Latinx American artists with thought-provoking pieces in SAM’s permanent collection.

Alfredo Arreguín

Installation view of “American Art: The Stories We Carry” at Seattle Art Museum, 2025, photo: Chloe Collyer

Alfredo Arreguín was one of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent Chicano artists. SAM has five of his pieces in our collection, including the striking canvas Four Self-Portraits (1995).

Arreguín painted nearly his entire life, starting his craft at age 9. After graduating from the prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria at the University of Mexico, he moved to Seattle to study architecture, interior design, and art at the University of Washington.

Layered with bright colors, intricate patterns, and hidden symbols, Arreguín’s mosaic masterpieces blend his internal and external surroundings. Through his art, he explored the natural and spiritual environments of both Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, crafting tapestries that reflected his multifaceted identity, cultural heritage, and adopted hometown.

Sadly, Arreguín passed away in 2023—but his legacy lives on at the Seattle Art Museum in our ongoing exhibition “American Art: The Stories We Carry.” (Learn more about Arreguín in our 2023 blog post by Theresa Papanickolas, SAM Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art.)

Isabella Villaseñor

*Grabado en Madera,* mid 20th century, Isabel Villaseñor, Mexican, 1910-1954, Print, Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Davis Hatch Jr., 44.613, Photo: Elizabeth Mann.

From sculpting to composing, post-revolutionary Mexican artist Isabella Villaseñor was a woman of nearly all creative trades. She is well-known for her woodcut prints, such as Grabado en Madera (1929) in SAM’s permanent collection.

Growing up in Mexico City, Villaseñor inherited a love of popular Mexican music and had an intrinsic knack for writing, winning numerous literary awards. She then pursued art at Centro Popular de Pintura, where she developed her signature style in engravings and paintings.

Her engravings and paintings often featured women in the domestic sphere. Villaseñor’s woodcut print Grabado en Madera depicts three women huddling together in conversation, connecting over personal stories or community gossip. Through her signature linework, shading, and composition, Villaseñor’s dichromatic artwork tells a powerful story of womanhood and connection.

Villaseñor died in her early 40s, but her multifaceted art—including work with revolutionary artist group ¡30-30!—left a major impact.

Paloma Contreras Lomas

Paloma Contreras Lomas, a mixed media artist who uses her work to tackle contemporary issues, particularly those facing her home country of Mexico. She also addresses injustices that resonate universally: gender, violence, inequitable political structures, class differences, post-colonialism, and the destruction of the environment.

Contreras Lomas utilizes multiple types of media in her art, demonstrated in her piece from SAM’s collection, El ciudadano más oscuro (el árbol que mira), which translates to “The darkest citizen (the tree that watches).”

Using graphite, charcoal, pastel, and oil stick, she covers a framed piece of linen canvas with hidden symbols to address stereotypes of Mexican culture. Her work often incorporates the aesthetics of horror films and the macabre, while also using pop culture, color, and cartoon figures that add an ironic and often humorous lens.

Emilio Amero

Emilio Amero was a major figure of the Mexican Modern art movement. Though he only lived in the Pacific Northwest for six years, Amero—a painter, printmaker, muralist, and filmmaker—made a significant impact on Seattle’s art scene and SAM’s collection.

After training as an artist in Mexico City, he worked between Mexico and New York City for many years, including a stint as an assistant to painter Diego Rivera. In 1941, Amero received a teaching fellowship at the University of Washington and then taught at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Some of his pieces were purchased by SAM’s first director, Richard Fuller, as early as 1942. (Today, 46 of his works are in SAM’s collection.) In 1946, Amero received an honorable mention in oil for his painting, Four Female Figures, at the Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists held by SAM. He went on to serve as the jury chairman for several years.

His surrealist works depict scenes that are more metaphorical and allegorical than realistic representations. Amero’s modernism and experimentation with form and composition was influenced by the mural traditions he learned at home, as well as ancient Indigenous art of Mexico.

—Nicole Block, Curatorial Manager of SAM’s permanent collection, and Sara Butler, Marketing Copywriter at SAM

Object of the Week: Head of a Woman

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Mar 11 2016

Our mission statement here—“SAM connects art to life”—truly guides much of our work and many of the decisions our leadership team makes. We see art as a response to life and as something that should be accessible to everyone in their different journeys. Believing our art is relevant, we want to show people how it’s relevant. It’s why we have a blog series where we talk about our collection objects!

In the museum space, we also connect art to art. When SAM expanded in 2007, the curators made a point of bringing their permanent collection displays together in thoughtful ways. We published a book at the time, called Bridging Cultures, which outlined the curators’ thinking. If art connects to life, and if all of us who share life are interconnected, then all art is somehow linked too. Finding those points of connection can be difficult. I love wandering our permanent collection galleries because these connections across people and across time become clearer and more meaningful to me.

Mexican American artist Emilio Amero was born in Ixtlahuaca in 1901. He trained at the Fine Arts School of San Carlos, and in 1924, he worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on a mural project at the Ministry of Education Building in Mexico City. In 1955 Amero finally realized his own mural, not in his native Mexico, but in Norman, Oklahoma, where he had taken up a teaching post at the university about a decade earlier. He worked in a wide range of materials over his career, but his work in lithography was particularly significant. So, why are three Amero paintings, including this striking Head of a Woman, hanging in our gallery of Pacific Northwest Modernism, alongside works by Mark Tobey and Guy Anderson?

From 1941-1947, Amero brought his talents to Seattle. Invited to teach at the University of Washington on a Walker-Ames Fellowship, Amero established a reputation as a skilled artist and teacher. A 1942 advertisement for a print shop Amero ran quotes Walter F. Isaacs, then director of the School of Art at the University of Washington, who calls him “one of the most able and versatile art teachers in this country.” In 1943 Amero moved to the faculty at Cornish School of the Arts. For the school’s 30^th year, opening of September that year, he served as director and instructor of painting, drawing, commercial and graphic arts—joined on the faculty, as he is today in our galleries, by Guy Anderson, who taught children’s art. Not to brag on us, but we have an important collection of Amero paintings that is a monument to his time here.

Like other notable artists working in Seattle at the time, many of whom grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Amero was geographically far from the forms of Modernism developing in New York. His vision was essentially different because it was rooted in Mexico. There, Modernism developed after the Social Revolution of 1910, as artists like Amero and Rivera shrugged off what had become an oppressive European influence, looking instead to ancient indigenous Mexican art. The heritage of Amero’s native Mexico inspired his form of Modernism much like the land and peoples of the Pacific Northwest inspired Tobey and Anderson.

—Jeffrey Carlson, SAM Collections Coordinator

Image: Head of a Woman, 1947, Emilio Amero (Born Ixtlahuaca, Mexico, 1901; died Norman, Oklahoma, 1976), tempera on panel, 18 1/4 x 15 1/2 in. Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 47.134, Photo: Natali Wiseman. Caption for ad: Seattle Daily Times, August 9, 1942, p. 30.