In his most recent project, Oaxacan artist Alberto Cruz depicts the connections between childhood and nature through a collection of twenty-one linocuts featuring diverse ecosystems as settings for new visual stories about children and animals.
The series is organized in seven thematic groupings, each corresponding to a distinct ecosystem and composed of three images: safari, lake, beach, North Pole, forest, mountain, and desert. Across these images we see children embarking on adventures alongside birds, elephants, hippopotamuses, polar bears, dogs, reptiles, and other quadrupeds.
The creativity of children’s minds has always been a central theme in Cruz’s work. They are the protagonists in this series, depicted as free, strong, dignified, and meditative human beings, with animals as allies, travel guides, and companions. Cruz typically makes art for people of all ages, but children are the intended primary audience for this project—a sensibility rooted in his four years teaching art to kindergarten and elementary students in Oaxaca, an experience he credits with reshaping how he sees the world.
Cruz’s practice is centered on linocut, a technique he values for its directness and immediacy. Working from small-format drawings, he developed an aesthetic built on high contrast: black and white as the dominant visual language, with color used sparingly and deliberately. In this new series, he has expanded his palette and introduced backgrounds and larger formats as ways of engaging more fully with the exhibition space. “If I use pink, or blue, it conveys very different meanings,” he explains. The shift marks a notable evolution from his signature isolated figures, while his fundamental commitment to economy of line and composition remains intact.
In his visual universe, Cruz imagines children and animals coexisting because he sees deep correspondences between human beings and the rest of the animal world. “I’ve always thought that each animal has a distinctive quality, in the same manner as each person has a gift or an aptitude,” he says. His compositions are deliberately schematic—a child, an object, an animal, typically close but not touching—and he describes the process as one that consistently surprises him: “What I’m drawing always surprises me. To me it’s impossible to believe I’m doing it; it’s as if it wasn’t me.”
A recurrent symbol in these works is an open book, which points toward the influence of picture books on Cruz’s storytelling — particularly in how he builds narrative without words. His images carry no titles, and he makes no effort to explain them; instead he trusts viewers to generate their own meanings. That openness is intentional. “I may transit from joy to sadness, from solitude to company, although I don’t realize it,” he says. “I think all human beings go back and forth between those feelings, and I think that’s what connects people with my work.”
Cruz is a co-founder of Burro Press, a printmaking collective workshop in downtown Oaxaca City, and of Mini Print Oaxaca, an annual contest created to support the development of printmaking in the region. He came to the discipline through drawing, eventually gravitating toward printmaking as the technique most closely aligned with it—through lithography, woodcut, and linocut, he found a world built on chiaroscuro and high contrast that felt native to his sensibility.
Cruz was commissioned by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, in Memphis, Tennessee, to create twenty-one works that will be permanently installed in its patient care facilities. The commission reflects the institution's commitment to creating healing environments for the children in its care. This summer, a selection of works from the commission will be exhibited at Hecho a Mano Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.