Enrique Chagoya: My Graduation from Teaching

After more than three decades of teaching in Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History, Professor of Art Practice Enrique Chagoya retires from teaching this summer. An internationally recognized artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, printmaking, and conceptual art, Chagoya has inspired generations of students through his commitment to creative exploration, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary dialogue. In this reflection, Chagoya looks back on 31 years in the classroom, the lessons he learned from his students, and his hopes for the future of art, creativity, and humanity.

For me, retirement is the most joyful dive into the abyss of economic and social uncertainty of today. It is like the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”—but in the present tense, with history repeating itself. I would simply say that retirement is an optimistic leap of faith into one’s future outside of academia, despite the current context.

It is with mixed feelings that I am retiring from teaching. I should say graduating from teaching, with a sense of humor, because I learned a great deal from my students, and I am certainly not retiring from making art. I cherish what I have learned from them over more than three decades, and I am going to miss that part of my life. At the same time, I am excited to dedicate myself full-time to my artwork and research, continuing to apply everything I have learned over the years to my creative practice.

Learning Twice

It has been said that those who teach learn twice. More than an old cliché, it is a fact. 

For thirty-one years, I had to revisit everything I knew about my practice and then share that knowledge with my students. Through teaching, I discovered many new ways of thinking about the creative process. I was like a fish in water teaching drawing, painting, and printmaking, but I loved stepping outside of my comfort-zone teaching classes such as art and economics in my MFA concept seminars for the last twenty years, and more recently, exploring the interaction between neurosciences and art practice, as I did last fall. 

Some of my favorite learning experiences came from these classes outside my comfort zone, along with my drawing courses. In those classes, whenever I saw the difference between a student's early drawings and their later work, I witnessed the remarkable transformation that could happen in just a few weeks. It was one of the most rewarding experiences—for the student and for me.

It has been a circular learning-sharing-teaching interaction. I witnessed how our minds develop not only the ability to truly see the visual information before us, but also the capacity to invent visual languages that are particular and unique to each student as they discover their own creative selves—like opening a box of wonders that can never be closed again.

Practicing drawing helps strengthen that part of our minds. I had felt this intuitively for decades, but it was confirmed as I watched the evolution of my students' work in my classes and through the writings of neuroscientists exploring visual neuroplasticity (see Oliver Sacks's collection of case studies in An Anthropologist on Mars and Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross).

I am especially grateful to Clara Maria Bacmeister, a fifth-year PhD student in Neurosciences at the School of Medicine, for helping me prepare a class that opened a new horizon in my teaching. Without her insight, enthusiasm, and help in developing the course materials and curriculum, the class would not have happened.

Our class, Between Mind and Play on Paper: A Neuro-aesthetics Exploration, was a major challenge to develop. It kept me up at night, but it helped me better understand how beneficial both art practice and art appreciation can be for our mental health. I applied what I learned in my final Drawing II class this past spring, which resulted in some incredible student work and culminated in a colorful collaborative work on paper. This time, the class unfolded without the stress of the previous one. One of my students from the class, Sisely DeLisi, recently accepted a position at Creativity Explored in San Francisco. I am very happy about that.

Teaching art and economics in our graduate seminars grew increasingly complex over the years. By the end, I had incorporated films, guest speakers, and new and updated readings—including many suggested by the students—that sparked rich discussions. 

The aesthetic value of an artwork and its exchange value are as opposite as any binary can be, much like the "ideal" versus the "material." Most artists create for many reasons, but the monetary side of art is usually the last thing on their minds (with some exceptions, such as artists working in industrial applied arts or, more recently, programming AI). Art and Economics was a seminar that provided endless food for thought.

One of my favorite moments was when one of my graduate students, Bailey Sciezka, whose work focuses on their gender identity, wrote a play about the elite art market featuring an all-lesbian cast. During one seminar, we gathered around the table and each read a different role. I played the "hot blond" art mogul described in the script, while others impersonated talking furniture. We laughed nonstop, repeatedly interrupting the reading of the script during the presentation. 

On Creativity and A.I.

Making art is one of the activities that humanizes us, in all its forms: visual arts, dance, music, creative writing, multimedia, performance, digital media, and more. My advice to students, as well as to myself, is to maintain an ongoing creative practice. We must remain aware that creativity is shaped by our individual biology; by our brain and our senses; by our gut as our second brain; and by our unique social and cultural experiences that shape our consciousness. It is also shaped by the joyful and difficult moments of our lives—the heartbreaks, the loves, whether or not we have children, our families, our friendships, and the drama of being human. None of this can be replaced by bots.

Together with the humanities we encounter throughout our formative years and our ongoing curiosity, these experiences will be our best protection against any “A.I. apocalypse.” The A.I. industry is now recognizing that the humanities are something it can also exploit for profit, but our individual biology and lived experiences cannot be duplicated (unless, someday, a cyborg—half human, half computer chip—is developed, like a new Frankenstein creature).

However, if we remain at the steering wheel rather than in the passenger seat, A.I. can become a tool that supports our agency: an assistant to our work, not the driver. This is only possible if technology finds ways to reduce its enormous demand for natural resources, including space, water, energy, and rare earth metals. The current trajectory is neither sustainable nor beneficial for the ecology and climate, let alone for economic and social stability.

We need to preserve our freedom of thought and expression as human beings and artists, against all odds, so that we can continue reimagining a better world for humanity and for life on this planet.

Perfecting the imperfect is a process in artmaking, just as it is in our social transformation toward a more diverse, inclusive, and egalitarian world. For that, we also need the freedom to make mistakes and the freedom to correct them. Most mistakes are reversible if we accept them, learn from them, and allow them to inform our creative practices and our lives.

Chagoya explores many of these themes further in his recent podcast interview, "Enrique Chagoya on Invisible Censorship, Keeping Our Humanity, and Uselessness" (Roborant Review, July 2026).

Gratitude

Finally, I would like to thank and acknowledge the many students who taught me what to do—and what not to do—in my teaching. Through them, I continued to improve my practice as an educator and as an artist. I remain in touch with many of them; I have exchanged artwork with some, received work from others, and purchased work from a few. I remain friends with several who occasionally come to dinner at my home with their spouses, or whom I visit, along with their families, when I travel to their current hometowns. Others became colleagues after graduating, and I continue to follow their exhibitions whenever I can, just as they follow mine. The great majority have moved on with their lives, and I rarely hear from them, as is natural.

I am certain that I will remember other names I should have included after submitting this text, and I apologize in advance to those I have unintentionally left out. I am currently under the pressure of several deadlines and retirement logistics. Please stay in touch, especially if I neglected to include your name here. My Stanford email address will remain active and follow me into retirement.

I would like to thank (in alphabetical and chronological disorder) the following:

Undergraduates: Mandi Alexander, Tauba Auerbach, Nick Stone, Bly Pope, Cynthia Daignault, Emma Webster, Michelle Ruvolo, Patricia Kwok, Emily Prince, Kyle Williams, Jessica Lisagor, Gunner Dongieux, Alyssa Victoria Díaz, Ozlem Ozgur, Kathy Yang, Ann Manly, Arethea Lim, Cathy Yang, Allegra McComb, Lisa Do, Jackie Liu, Noah Hornick, Katherina H. Nguyen, Katherine Pruitt, Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch, Lorena Diosdado, Nora Collins, Uma Daval, Meagan Wu, Regina Kong, Hailey Elizabeth Taylor, Jude Wolf, Stella Marie Cushing, Sophia Zhang, Kosi K. Hadzhivanov, Celina Chen, Nicha Rattanabut, Laeci M. Callahan, Zoe A. Ehrlich, Ava V. Lazar, Connie Liou, Hanxin Liu, Henry Ojeaburu, Nathaniel Mensah, Nova Goode-Williams, Gisele M. Maimuna, Aileen Rubio, Polycarpos Yiorkadis, Sisely J. DeLisi, Mia Laursen.

Graduates: Colin Beatty, Diana Kunce, Rebecca Hackemann, Jaime Snyder, the late Margaret Kilgallen, Rigo 23, Jackie Sumell, Amy Franceschini, Chris Bell, Kamau Patton, Joselyn Robert, Binta Ayofemi, Jamil Hellu, Jason Jagel, Lordy Rodriguez, Ala Ebtekar, Adriane Colburn, Bob Linder, Kota Ezawa, Reed Anderson, Stephanie Syjuco, Juan Luna-Avin, Mike Arcega, Phillip Ross, Jerome Reyes, Jeremiah Barber, Arnold Kemp, Chris Duncan, Lauren Toomer, Yvette K. Deas, Joe Ferriso, Victor Yañez, Shirin Towfiq, Sanaz Mazinani, Sally Scopa, Amy Elkins, Gabi Grill, Liz L. Maelane, Stuart Robertson, Brett Amory, Joshua Moreno, Mad Luellen, Rhonda Holberton, Adam Katseff, Shaun O’Dell, Terry Powers, Masako Miyazaki, Gregory Rick, Krystal Ramírez, Wendy Liu, Tina Kashiwagi, Joanna Keane Lopez, Pablo Tut, Daniela Rossell, Miguel Novelo, Miguel Monroy, Andrew Catanese, Emily Harter, Jessica Monette, Yunfei Ren, Rebecca Han (Law School), Clara M. Bacmeister (School of Medicine, Neurosciences), Peter E. Carpenter (Mgmt. Science and Engineering), Pedro Marnoto (Documentary Film), and from the most recent cohort: Bailey Sciezka, Hudson Hatfield, Vincent Chong (AKA Crystal Monkey), Alexa Burrell, and Enam Gbewonyo.