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• Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, January/February 2004
  
• Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago, IL, August-November 2004
  
• National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Annual Conference, Washington D.C., October 2004
  
• Dougherty Arts Center, Austin, Texas, January 2005
  
• Instituto de Mexico, San Antonio, Texas, February 2005
  
• Track 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA, July-August 2005
  
• Together for Justice: Art & Activism; Benefit for Death Penalty Focus, San Francisco, CA, October 23, 2005
  
• Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, April-May, 2006
  
• Asian Resource Gallery, Oakland, CA (preview exhibition; April-June, 2003)
  

PRESS RELEASE
Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment, Recent Works by Malaquias Montoya features recently created silkscreen images and paintings, and related research dealing with the death penalty and penal institutions. Montoya has created images so powerful, disturbing, and introspective, that the viewer will not be able to examine them and walk away without feeling that they have witnessed an atrocity committed in their name. As Montoya states, "We have perfected the art of institutional killing to the degree that it has deadened our national, quintessentially human, response to death. I wanted to produce a body of work depicting the horror of this act." In these works, Montoya illuminates the inhumanity of state-sponsored premeditated murder ­ a situation where the use of punishment to discourage crime encourages criminality.

Malaquias Montoya is a leading figure in the West Coast political Chicano graphic arts movement, a political and socially conscious movement that expresses itself primarily through the mass production of silk-screened posters. Montoya's works include acrylic paintings, murals, washes, and drawings, but he is primarily known for his silkscreen prints, which have been exhibited nationally as well as internationally. He is credited by historians as being one of the founders of the "social serigraphy" movement in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1960s. His visual expressions, art of protest, depict the struggle and strength of humanity and the necessity to unite behind that struggle. Montoya's work uses powerful images, which are combined with text to create his socially critical messages. Montoya has lectured and taught at numerous universities and colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of Arts and Crafts. He was a visiting professor in the Art Department at the University of Notre Dame in 2000, and continues as a Visiting Fellow for the Institute for Latino Studies, also at Notre Dame. Since 1989 Montoya has been a professor at the University of California, Davis. His classes, through the Departments of Chicana/o Studies and Art, include silkscreening, poster making and mural painting, and focus on Chicana/o culture and history.

For more information, bookings, tour schedules and new venues please contact Lezlie Salkowitz-Montoya at 707.447.4194 or by e-mail at lsmontoya@earthlink.net