Adrián Aguirre’s latest work stretched partially completed along a wall as he sat in his Las Cruces studio and talked about where his passion began. It was not in a studio nor even with the idea that he might someday become an artist.
Aguirre thought about another wall. As a boy, he remembers waiting in a hospital in Juárez where his parents took him for appointments and emergency care. It was before smartphones provided an easy distraction during a long wait, so Aguirre locked in on a mural wrapped around four walls.
Like many of the murals he remembers in Mexico, this one had a narrative. It told a story of the Mexican Revolution, of workers and of the struggle that helped bring public health care to ordinary people.
“That really, I think, inspired me,” Aguirre said.
There were other influences. His father drew, and Aguirre remembers having much the same impulse.
“If I had a pencil in my hand, I just drew,” he said. “Most of my notes were doodled. It just came natural to me to want to draw.”
What took longer was figuring out what he wanted those drawings to say. Today, Aguirre’s work centers largely on immigration and displacement and the people whose lives can disappear inside the political arguments surrounding both. His paintings have taken him from encounters with day laborers to migrant camps and now to the unfinished mural taking shape in his studio. That body of work recently earned Aguirre one of New Mexico’s most significant arts honors. The Las Cruces artist is one of eight recipients of the 2026 Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts.
The path from the kid with a pencil to the artist being honored by the state wasn’t an obvious one. Aguirre didn't know working artists growing up and didn't imagine himself becoming one. He was good at math, and his parents suggested practical possibilities such as engineering or computer science.
The aptitude was there, but the interest was not. Eventually, his parents could see it, too.
He studied graphic design at New Mexico State University and found work creating digital graphics. But he also took painting electives, and a professor encouraged him to take more.
There was something different about paint. Graphic design generally meant making something on a computer for somebody else. Painting offered Aguirre the opportunity to figure out what he wanted to make.
Then he discovered it could also allow him to say something.
It was around 2003. We were still dealing with the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq War had begun, and Aguirre was uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric he was hearing around him.
“I felt like I needed to say something,” he said. “I hear everybody saying these things and I want to say something different about it.”
Aguirre describes himself as shy. Standing in front of people to make that argument wasn't particularly appealing, but on canvas his thoughts could shine.
“I thought, well, I can say some of these things in a painting,” he said.
So, he painted about the war. Aguirre can look back now and acknowledge they weren't necessarily great paintings. But something happened while he was making them.
“I like painting and I like saying things about politics,” he remembers realizing.
The work helped Aguirre get into an MFA program at the University of North Texas, where he could spend most of his days painting and developing technically as an artist. But one of the most important things he learned there came from getting out of the studio.
Aguirre began a project drawing portraits of day laborers. He went to where they were, drew them on site and talked with them. He got to know them.
One person was shy. Another was loud and outgoing. Someone was funny. Someone else was more serious.
When Aguirre returned to the studio, he wasn't painting an anonymous person representing a political issue. He knew something about the individual whose face he was putting on the canvas.
“I wasn't just speaking about politics,” Aguirre said. “I was speaking about people that I was interacting with.”
It changed the way he approached his work. Reactions to those portraits helped Aguirre understand what the work could do. Someone would look at a painting and recognize a person from a construction job.
“That looks like the guy I work with,” Aguirre remembers hearing. “Or that looks like my grandmother.”
For Aguirre, those reactions led to what he wanted to accomplish. Immigration can easily become an abstraction. Political rhetoric can reduce large groups of people to numbers, labels or something unfamiliar and distant. Aguirre wants his paintings to push in the other direction. He wants to close the distance.
“This person is your grandmother,” he said. “Who you interacted with, who you were friendly with.”
Aguirre isn't expecting a painting to settle a political argument. But perhaps it can change the way someone sees the person inside that argument. Maybe that person isn't simply somebody “over there” crossing a border. Maybe it looks like somebody you know.
After graduate school, life intervened. Aguirre graduated around the time of the housing crisis, moved and continued painting but didn't fully return to it until 2019.
By then, immigration had again become a dominant part of the national conversation. Aguirre was seeing images of caravans of Central American migrants moving north. The federal government's Remain in Mexico policy meant asylum seekers were waiting in Mexico for hearings in the United States, and camps developed to accommodate them.
Aguirre traveled to a migrant camp and spent several days doing much the same thing he had done with the day laborers years earlier. He drew portraits, had conversations, and took photographs. Then he went home and painted.
That process says something about where Aguirre's creativity comes from. He begins with the larger conversation — what is happening and what people are saying about immigration — and considers what he wants to say about it. But the work itself often comes from getting closer.
Even his photography is largely observational. Aguirre generally avoids asking people to pose. He photographs what he encounters, then returns to the images later.
Sometimes something he barely noticed while taking the photograph catches his attention on a computer screen. It might even be a low-resolution detail somewhere in the background.
Aguirre also draws inspiration from photojournalism and the ability of a powerful photograph to communicate something without requiring an accompanying argument. The attraction makes sense for an artist who once discovered painting as an alternative to standing in front of people and speaking. The image can do the talking.
And now, inside Aguirre's studio, one of those stories is becoming much larger. The unfinished work along the wall is part of a mural Aguirre is creating for a chapel connected to Annunciation House in El Paso, which has provided shelter and assistance to migrants for decades.
The project traces the causes of displacement, and the hardships migrants can encounter along their journeys. It begins with the Darién Gap, the roadless and dangerous stretch between South and Central America that migrants cross on foot. From there, Aguirre's narrative moves through Guatemala and Mexico, across the desert and eventually to the U.S.-Mexico border and detention.
This project differs somewhat from Aguirre's other work. Annunciation House commissioned the mural and asked for specific elements to be depicted, but the larger subject is familiar.
“The causes of displacement and the hardships that come through immigration,” Aguirre said.
Something else is familiar. A story is once again unfolding across a wall.
The Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts have recognized New Mexico artists and arts supporters for more than 50 years. Established in 1974 by then-Gov. Bruce King and first lady Alice King, the awards are presented by the New Mexico Arts Commission and New Mexico Arts in collaboration with the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham described this year's eight honorees as artists and organizations who represent New Mexico's artistic heritage. Aguirre was recognized specifically for work examining displacement, asylum, border enforcement and immigration and the human consequences surrounding them.
The awards will be presented Oct. 15 at St. Francis Auditorium at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Work from the recipients will also be displayed in the Governor's Gallery at the Roundhouse.
The honor hasn't dramatically changed Aguirre's practical realities of being an artist. He continues to work in digital graphics at NMSU's Innovative Media Research and Extension, returning to the same workplace where his professional career began. He enjoys the job and considers himself fortunate to make a living doing creative work. Naturally, he would like more time to paint.
“This is my passion,” Aguirre said. “The more I could spend more time in the studio, great. If I'm able to do this on the weekends and then make a living and, you know, feed my kids, I'm happy.”
And there are still walls waiting for him. The one Aguirre remembers from the Juárez hospital told the story of people and politics, struggle and change. Decades later, it’s an unfinished mural on a wall in his Las Cruces studio that tells another story about people caught in circumstances much larger than themselves.
Somewhere between those two walls, Aguirre figured out what the boy who couldn't keep from doodling wanted to do with a pencil and a paintbrush.
He wanted to make people look and perhaps see someone in a different light.
