West Bloomfield Township painter, cultural activist, and gallerist Nora Chapa Mendoza, 92, was named the 2024 Eminent Artist by Kresge Arts in Detroit, an office of the College for Creative Studies.
“It’s an incredible thing to have happened in your life,” says Chapa Mendoza.
She is the 16th recipient of the award since 2008, which recognizes a lifetime’s contribution to an artist’s chosen forms of expression and the cultural community of metro Detroit.
The honor includes an unrestricted prize of $100,000 (new this year – it previously had been $50,000) as well as production of a short film, a monograph, and other efforts to elevate the year’s artist by the Kresge Foundation and Kresge Arts in Detroit.
“Her work conveys a rare combination of grace and perseverance in the face of the innumerable societal obstacles placed in the path of an artist with Chicano and indigenous roots,’’ says Rip Rapson, president and CEO of the Kresge Foundation. “She has inspired multiple generations with her full and powerful embrace of the overlapping causes of women, migrant workers and civil rights.”
The increase in the award size was made by the Kresge Foundation to boost the region’s direct support to individual artists by upping both the per-award amount and the number of Kresge Artist Fellows, a companion program to the Kresge Eminent Artists.
This summer, Kresge Arts in Detroit will announce 25 Kresge Artist Fellows who will each receive $40,000. Previously, The Kresge Foundation funded 20 fellows annually at $25,000 each.
As a founding member of the Michigan Hispanic Cultural/Art Association and the former owner of her own gallery, Chapa Mendoza is a champion of Hispanic culture.
In 1999, Gov. John Engler presented Chapa Mendoza with the Michigan Artist of the Year and Governor’s Award in recognition of her cultural commitment to the state and, most notably, southwest Detroit.
Chapa Mendoza was born on Jan. 20, 1932, in Weslaco, Texas just miles away from the Mexican border. She was the youngest of Casimiro and Josefa Chapa’s three children.
In 1953, at age 21, she married, and followed her husband, Sam Mendoza, a doctor, to Detroit, where he did his residency. At the time painting was only as a hobby.
Chapa Mendoza later studied art at the College for Creative Studies, then known as the Center for Creative Studies, and at Madonna University in Livonia. She also studied independently with local artist mentors including painters Richard Kozlow and Ljubo Biro.
She became a founding member of Nuestras Artes de Michigan, a collective of Latin artists with chapters in Detroit, Pontiac, and Ann Arbor. In 1981, she launched Galeria Mendoza, in Detroit’s Harmonie Park district. The gallery was considered Detroit’s first solely Latin American
showcase, with Chapa Mendoza’s paintings regularly paired with at least one new emerging Latin artist. Chapa Mendoza closed the gallery three years later to focus on her own painting.
