A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel de Allende.
The Mexico City born, Tijuana raised artist behind The Book of Life and Maya and the Three has never had a solo show in Mexico, and never a Día de Muertos one. Muertitos is both, at Galería Blue Moon, with about thirty-five paintings, an artist reception on October 30, and a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary attached.
The director of The Book of Life has never shown his paintings in Mexico, and has never made a Día de Muertos show. Muertitos is both, at Galería Blue Moon in colonia San Antonio. He flies in for one night in the gallery, Friday October 30, 5 to 7pm.
Mexican folk art has never asked to be protected. It asks to be lived with: bought in a market, wrapped in newspaper, set on a shelf low enough for a child to reach. The saint’s eyes do not quite line up. The paint sits thick in the wrong places. Two figures from the same hands, the same pigment, the same afternoon refuse to come out identical, and that refusal is the entire argument.
Jorge R. Gutiérrez was a kid from Mexico City when he first ran into that argument, on the road with parents who had one rule about the country they lived in. “You have to see Mexico,” is how he remembers it, at fifty-one, from Los Angeles, where he has spent most of his working life. Wherever the family could go, they went. San Miguel de Allende came up on the itinerary more than once.
He comes back this month with about thirty-five paintings and a show called Muertitos. It opens Thursday, October 22 at Galería Blue Moon on Stirling Dickinson 7, in colonia San Antonio, and stays up through Sunday, November 8. It is the first Día de Muertos show of his career and his first solo show anywhere in Mexico, which he finds funnier than anyone. He is in the room for exactly one evening of it: Friday, October 30, from 5 to 7pm, when he and his wife arrive for the artist reception and he talks about the work, with the town already in full Muertos.
What held him here as a child was not reverence. It was reach. “It made art really, like, buying groceries. It was something that was part of your life,” he says. You did not need a museum to stand in front of it, and you did not need a fortune to take it home. The imperfection did the rest. “I love this idea that it was imperfect. Imperfection is what makes us human, and these pieces are a reflection of that.” He is careful to place that affection in its moment. In the Mexico of his childhood, folk art was the thing the country was looking past. “A lot of people in Mexico didn’t look at Mexico. We were fighting for the U.S. and Europe, and everybody except our own folk art.”
Gutiérrez directed The Book of Life for Guillermo del Toro’s production banner, which took a Golden Globe nomination for best animated feature, created El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nickelodeon, and made Maya and the Three for Netflix, which took an Emmy and an Annie. The painting was never the thing he did afterward. “Every kid is an artist, and then some stop doing it, and the ones that keep at it are basically the ones that hopefully become professionals.”
Animation is all-consuming and shared by definition. A film is hundreds of people and four or five years, and sometimes it is four or five years and no film. Painting became the exact opposite of his day job. “I get to finish something by myself. I can take as long or as little as I want. I can make an idea and put it there, and I can move on, which is not something that’s easy to do in the film industry.”
The professional turn came out of thrift. Someone saw the paintings on Instagram and asked him to paint a mural at a school. The mural ended, the paint did not. “I’m very frugal. I couldn’t let this paint go bad.” The Book of Life was wrapping, he escaped into the leftovers, and the work kept going: a first gallery show, then a book of the paintings, then a decade of Los Angeles exhibitions. Border Bang, Luchapolis, Son of a Hollywood, this year’s FÚTBOL! FÚTBOL!! FÚTBOL!!!, one obsession at a time. “My day job is animation. My passion job, honestly, has been painting.” By the end of 2026 he will have passed one hundred paintings in a single year, and he intends to take 2027 off from the easel to recover.
At nine he moved from Mexico City to Tijuana, his father’s city, and started crossing the border most days, the way thousands of kids still do. “It’s impossible to not be bombarded by the collision of these cultures.” On one wall: the Virgen de Guadalupe beside Mickey Mouse beside Cantinflas beside Batman. He has been painting that wall ever since.
His vocabulary runs from retablos and Mesoamerican carving to punk flyers, anime and tattoo flash, and he refuses realism on principle, painting people the way saints, stone demigods and cartoon characters get painted. The logic underneath is flatter than it looks. Aztec iconography, the Revolution and El Chavo del Ocho now carry the same weight, all of it equally ancient and equally available. “We’re basically the myth makers of today.” So Skeletor turns up. So does Mickey, and specifically the wrong Mickey: “I’m very much in love with bootleg culture. It’s this idea that you take something and you make it your own.” He puts that at the center of being Mexican, and reaches for the taquería to prove it. Lebanese immigrants arrive, the shawarma meets pork, and al pastor becomes so Mexican that nobody thinks about it. “We take things from all over the world and we make them ours.”
There is a line in Tijuana he likes: nobody is more from Tijuana than someone who is not from Tijuana. It is a border city of people from everywhere in Latin America who meant to cross and stayed, plus Americans who came down to retire, or fell for the place, or live there and cross for work. “The mix of these cultures has its own culture.”
For years the culture sat on him as an obligation. “Early on, I felt the weight. I felt like I was carrying this boulder.” What lifted it was a demotion he gave himself. “I don’t speak for the culture. I am just one more representative of the culture. So you’re going to get my version of the culture.” The Book of Life is his Día de Muertos. Maya and the Three is his Mesoamerican creation myth and his conquest.
The permission came from the museum walls he grew up visiting. Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco all painted the conquest, independence and the revolution, and no two versions agree. Each one decides what to enlarge and what to leave in shadow. “They all look completely unique, and yet they’re all a thousand percent truthful, if it’s their interpretation.” He has compressed the lesson into something he says often: “Don’t let your culture define you. You get to define your culture.”
Then the enchiladas. Everyone’s favorite enchiladas are their mother’s, he points out, and every mother’s enchiladas are different from every other mother’s. “So what kind of enchiladas are you gonna make?”
He is watching the country he writes about from a distance and finding it hard to sit still. The galleries, the kitchens, the small shops backing unknown artists from all over Mexico and beyond, the people who arrived around the pandemic and stayed: the scene he had to leave in order to work in is now thriving at home. Some of it is visible in San Miguel any given month, at the Fábrica La Aurora studios or a fair like SOMOS.ARTE. “I make a living making stuff about Mexico, but I don’t actually live in Mexico,” he says. The gatekeeping that told artists a tradition had to be handled one specific way, he thinks, is finished. Language evolves, music evolves, food evolves.
When we spoke, twenty-nine paintings were finished and about thirty-five were coming. Skulls. Songs. The recently departed, including Dolly Parton, dead since August, in progress on his easel. Nothing is oversized, because getting work across a border and through customs is its own production. He is driving the paintings from Los Angeles down to Tijuana and mailing them into Mexico from there.
The holiday’s logic is the reason he can paint that much death and stay cheerful. “To have death all around you, it’s only going to encourage you to enjoy life more.” He says the dead are doing the encouraging: “All our dead, smiling at us and going, live.” And the obligation runs the other way too. “If you don’t talk about those who passed away, then they really are dead. But if you have them around you, and you talk about them, and you have images of them, and you remember them, and you eat their favorite food, and sing their favorite songs, guess what? They’re with us.” It is the same instinct San Miguel acts on every year with an ofrenda, whether the altar is a family’s marigolds and photographs or an artist’s reimagining of one.
Ask him for a favorite piece and he declines on structural grounds. He paints in the living room with everything up at once, to his wife’s ongoing patience. “I love this idea that the collective is a work of art, all of it. And it only exists once in the gallery. Those paintings will never be together again.” He says he is a closet muralist whom nobody will hire for murals, because murals take too long, so he has learned to build them in pieces. “It’s like you’re walking inside a mural.”
There are birds perched on his subjects’ heads in painting after painting, and the best reading of them came from a child. “Of course it’s the souls.” In older traditions the hummingbird carries the dead back for a visit, which is why the birds cluster wherever love is owed: they belong to those who came before, or they are the ones arriving.
In the skeletons he is painting for San Miguel, they do specific work. “This is not a little person who’s passed away. Look how surrounded they are by others like them.” He wants the sadness and the joy in the same frame, because he does not believe either one functions alone. “Life is sad and happy, because one doesn’t have value without the other. Just like death has no value without life.” Then he sets the bar where anyone can reach it: “If your life was 51% happy, you made it.”
Asked what nobody had thought to ask him, he went straight to money, which artists rarely do on the record. Galleries in the United States take fifty to sixty percent of a painting’s price. Blue Moon runs on a different model: the artist pays a fee to partner on the show, and the gallery takes no commission on sales. His arithmetic follows. “It’s only fair that they’re going to basically be 50% off what I usually sell stuff for.” He earns the same; the buyer pays half. For a young collector in San Miguel, that is the whole story.
He thinks the timing favors handmade things anyway. “The value of paintings is going up,” he says, and points at the obvious reason, plus a quieter one: a lot of people no longer want to do the hard work of learning. “It’s going to make handmade things that much more special.” He sees companies going out of their way to show process now, and audiences rewarding it. “I want human made.”
The show exists because of a wedding. He proposed on November 2 and married on Día de Muertos, and this year is the twenty-fifth anniversary. One of their first trips as a married couple was to San Miguel, during a heat wave, and his wife got sick, and he still counts it among the most memorable weeks of his life. They came back later with their son and with his parents.
They were deciding where to mark twenty-five years when an email arrived from Melissa Cobb, a colleague from his Hollywood years now connected to the gallery, suggesting San Miguel and a Día de Muertos show. He had never done one. “The gods have spoken.”
His wife, who also worked on The Book of Life, will be at the reception on October 30, between 5 and 7pm. He has offered to sign anything anyone brings, El Tigre, Maya, Muertos, bootleg or not, which from a man in love with bootlegs is not a joke but a position.
The day job continues in its own slow gear. He is working on the Speedy Gonzales film at Warner Bros. and a Netflix feature he is not allowed to name, and neither is due before 2030, because animation takes three or four years when it happens at all.
His mother, who is eighty-one, has told him how she wants to be remembered: for her kindness to her family. He turned the question over and landed somewhere else. “I adore my family, but I think I want to be remembered for having left animation better than I found it.”
The paintings go up on October 22 and the room is worth the walk on any afternoon. The thirtieth is different. It is the one evening Gutiérrez is standing in it, with his wife beside him, two days before the anniversary of the night he proposed, in a town that will already smell of cempasúchil and wet copal. He is talking about the work, which is the part that does not survive in a photograph: where a calavera came from, who he was thinking about while he painted it, why there is a bird on its head.
He is signing, too, and he set no conditions. El Tigre, Maya, Muertos, a book, a poster, a bootleg T-shirt somebody printed without asking, all of it. He will be happier about the bootleg.
It is also the last comfortable moment to take one home. The paintings are priced at roughly half what the same work costs in Los Angeles, because of how this gallery is built, and the ones that sell will be leaving with their buyers. Whatever is still on the wall after November 8 goes back to a living room in another country, and the thirty-five of them will not be in the same room again.
Galería Blue Moon, Stirling Dickinson 7, colonia San Antonio. Muertitos runs October 22 through November 8. Artist reception with Jorge R. Gutiérrez, Friday October 30, 5 to 7pm.
For eighteen days the collective hangs together on Stirling Dickinson, and then it scatters into other people’s houses, which is what Mexican art at its best has always done. It goes home with somebody. It sits on a shelf, imperfect, reachable, within arm’s length of a kid. The dead in those paintings are not asking to be mourned. They are smiling, and on the thirtieth, for two hours, so is the man who painted them. What they are all asking for is the fifty-one percent.
A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel.
