Regin igloria artist runner
Regin Igloria (born 1974) is a Filipino-American Chicago-based artist and teacher. He currently teaches studio courses at Marwen, a nonprofit youth arts organization. Previously, he has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Terra Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and various workshops in the Chicago area. Currently he serves as the Director of Artists-In-Residence at the Ragdale Foundation, an artist residency program for visual artists, writers and composers in Lake Forest, Illinois. He received his MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Igloria was raised in Albany Park on the northwest side of Chicago, where he operates a community project space for bookbinding. His work contains themes of nature and travel and their effect on the human condition.
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Early life
Igloria was born in Manila in 1974, and moved to Chicago when he was three years old. He grew up in Albany Park, a culturally diverse neighborhood. He has discussed his childhood feelings of stasis and his experiences of exploring the neighborhood, and how his childhood influenced his work.
Art
Igloria’s work is largely painting and drawing, works on paper, artists’ books, and performance art. His performance works are based on physical labor, including taking walks and documenting them in order to collect imagery for his drawings.
He worked on the Prairie Book drawings between 2005-2006, which were based on his earlier drawings of backpacks, inspired by his experience in graduate school. The drawings of the backpacks had exaggerated straps and were slightly abstracted in black and white. Both the Prairie Book drawings and the backpack drawings attempted to capture his experience of nature, without directly portraying nature. He instead drew objects that allowed him to go into nature and related the folds and ripples of the backpacks and straps with the patterns in nature as if he were hiking through the landscape of boulders and mountains.