Fred Villanueva (1973-) was born in Oak Cliff, Texas, outside of Dallas, and learned to paint on canvas at a Cistercian Boys School, where he learned about Basquiats death as a boy. He ran away to Santa Ana, CA, but later returned to Texas to finish Arts High School at Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts. After high school, he moved back to California, attending the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his BFA in Painting in 1995, after traveling Mexico to study muralism in Mexico City and pre-Columbian art in general. Finishing his last year independently in New York City through Parsons School of Design, he apprenticed with conceptual heavyweight Dennis Oppenheim.
It was in New York City with Oppenheim that he started thinking about conceptual and process art and how it related to the Abstract, Pop and Neo-Expressionist painting he loved as a kid, in addition to learning about a renaissance approach to working as an artist.
After several stints as a designer, including at a commercial silkscreen press designing billboard size commercial graphics, he moved to Madrid, Spain, where he first encountered Spanish painting, especially Guernica, by Picasso. While living briefly in Montmartre, Paris, he studied large scale canvas paintings at the Louvre by Delacroix, Rubens, and Manet, and vowed to make his own.
Back in New York, switching back and forth between abstraction and figurative work, Fred settled upon using recognizable images in paintings when abstraction looked beautiful but stopped talking back. Current visual language focuses on combining images from popular American media; especially ads, magazines, actresses, models, dancers, brands, and even Saints. The Western Paintings: Cowboys and Indians group of paintings came from the tongue and cheek expression Painting in the Western Tradition.
His mural scale work was exhibited in Washington, D.C. and viewed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.
He and his wife, actress Norah Sweeney, live and work in New York City.
