Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Mural, Drawing, Public Art
Website: josuerojasart.com
Josué Rojas is a Salvadoran-American painter, muralist, and educator based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Born in El Salvador, he arrived in San Francisco as a toddler after his family fled the country’s civil war, settling in the Mission. He grew up surrounded by the vibrant street culture of the 1980s and 1990s Mission — hand-painted fruit stand signs, emerging graffiti, and the neighborhood’s muralist tradition. After his father’s death in 1995, an internship at Precita Eyes Muralists redirected his life toward art; he painted his first mural that same year. Rojas holds a BFA in Painting/Drawing from the California College of the Arts and an MFA in Painting/Drawing from Boston University, where he studied under painter John Walker. Upon graduating, he received a Kahn Award that helped him establish a studio in the Mission District.
Before focusing full-time on his studio and mural practice, Rojas spent fifteen years as a bilingual journalist with Pacific News Service/New America Media and subsequently served as Executive Director of Acción Latina — publisher of El Tecolote, California’s longest-running bilingual newspaper (est. 1970) — from 2017 to 2021. He has been recognized as a YBCA Public Participation Fellow (Cohort 2019–20) and a Lucas Artists Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center (2009). He is a founding member of the CEIBA Project, a transnational art collaborative promoting art as nonviolence. In 2025, he completed a residency at the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program.
Rojas has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Incline Gallery, Arion Press, and Acción Latina’s Juan R. Fuentes Gallery. His public murals can be seen at Balmy Alley and throughout San Francisco. He has been commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission for a mural at the new Potrero Muni Yard. His work and community projects have been covered by Hyperallergic, KQED, the San Francisco Chronicle, Juxtapoz, and El Tecolote.
Rojas describes his practice as “bilingual” — merging East Coast and West Coast American artistic traditions with Mexican heritage and the visual languages of the Chicano movement. He blends acrylic, spray paint, and ink drawing to fuse U.S. pop culture imagery (cartoons, comics, Americana advertising) with Central American iconography, folklore, and indigenous symbolism. Recurring motifs include tropical birds, Mayan iconography, graffiti lettering, and characters reimagined from pop culture — such as Felix the Cat reborn as a plantain, or his recurring “Pupusa Face” character, inspired by Astro Boy, serving as a stand-in for his own Salvadoreño-Californio identity. He describes this visual back-and-forth between cultures through the concept of Vai Ven (Spanish for “come and go”).
His large-scale murals function as public records of community memory. He has said “murals are an external expression of a community’s internal values” and has compared the collaborative mural-making process to recording a jazz album. His work at the intersection of fine art and social practice addresses gentrification, police violence, immigration, and the often-invisible contributions of Central Americans to California’s cultural history.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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