About the Studio
Chayote Press was founded by Israel Campos to provide artists with the studio space to work with print media. Chayote Press is named in honor of the artist’s grandmother who is called Chayito as a term of endearment.
The studio is located in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles and serves artists in South LA. Printmaking has a long history of collaborative work and this is something that the studio actively promotes. The goal of the studio is to create a network of professional artists in South LA to increase the area’s cultural prominence. This is intended to serve as a safeguard against gentrification and to unify the artists to advocate for representation in galleries.
About the Artist
Israel is an interdisciplinary L.A. based artist that works with paintings, print media, digital media, and artist books. His work blends Mesoamerican iconography, generational myths, oral folklore and contemporary pop culture to collapse the centuries separating the different artforms. The work seeks to reveal the present as the inevitable outcome of interconnected past events and decisions. By seeing the past clearly, we can ask the right questions of the present to actively shape the future.
Israel graduated with a bachelors from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011 and acquired an MFA from the University of Wisconsin‐Madison in 2015. His work is in the permanent collections of the Kohler Art Library, the UCSC Digital Art Research Center, the Zuckerman Museum of Art, and the Oregon College of Art and Craft. He has exhibited in venues across the country, including the ArtHelix Gallery in New York City, the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art in Portland and is an active member of the Vox Pop printmaking artist collective and the California Society of Printmakers. He also runs and operates Chayote Press.