Javier Tapia

Javier Tapia (born 1957) is a Peruvian artist and painter.

Biography
Javier Tapia was born in 1957 in Lima, Peru, and grew up in a period of upheaval when guerrilla warfare dominated political and social movements across the country. He moved to the United States in the 1980s, witnessing various phases of humanity: good and evil, intellectual and primitive, connected and separate. Tapia takes these studio themes as abstract shapes and broad strokes to serve as a metaphor for chaos and control, or structure and disorder. In the tradition of the Peruvian Textile, he overlaps, subtracts, and reworks the watercolors, flipping the paper out as bold colors emerge like carvings. The active ingredients emit physically; Work becomes energetic, on the verge of chaos, but organized in the constraints of paperwork. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia and works in the Virginia Commonwealth University's Faculty of Painting and Print Production, where he has been teaching since 1988.

Education
From 1984 to 1987, Tapia studied at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts and was a recipient of a Presidential Scholarship.

In 2015, Tapia worked as an associate professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Typography at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In 2019, Tapia joined the staff of Virginia Commonwealth University. The school has also exhibited the department's art to view Javier's work.

Exhibitions
Tapia does not have a specific collection because he also collaborates with other artists on numerous exhibitions. He has more exhibited at the Embassy Art Gallery of Peru, Washington, DC; Museo de Osma, Barranco, Peru; Bloom Galleries, Milan, Italy; Hunt Galleries at Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, Virginia; 1708 Gallery, and Anderson Gallery, both, Richmond, Virginia. With him he participated in the Strategies in Contemporary Art of the Americas in Vincent Price Art Museum exhibition. along with colleagues whose works are tied to the legacy of colonialism and challenge the dominant, accepted stories.