Rigo 23 born (1966) Ricardo Gouveia, is a Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 muralist, painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, and political artist residing in San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

. Although he is known particularly in the San Francisco community for having painted a number of large scale Pop Art inspired "one way

One-way traffic

One-way traffic is traffic that moves in a single direction. A one-way street is a street either facilitating only one-way traffic, or designed to direct vehicles to move in one direction.-General signs:...

" sign murals, such as the "One Tree" mural on the US-101

US-101

US-101 may refer to:* U.S. Route 101* VH-71 Kestrel, U.S. military designation...

 onramp at 10th and Bryant Streets, the "interstate route sign" shaped Innercity/Home adorning an affordable housing high rise in downtown S.F., or the "Sky/Ground" mural at 3rd and Mission Street

Mission Street

Mission Street is a north-south arterial thoroughfare in San Francisco, California that runs from the city's southern border to its northeast corner. The street and the Mission District through which it runs were named for the Spanish Mission Dolores, several blocks away from the modern route. Only...

s, the bulk of RIGO's work more literally highlights world politics and political prisoners from the Black Panthers

Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....

 and the Angola Three to Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death. He has been described as "perhaps the world's best known death-row inmate", and his sentence is one of the most debated today...

, whose conviction for the murder of a policeman is contested, and the American Indian Movement

American Indian Movement

The American Indian Movement is a Native American activist organization in the United States, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota by urban Native Americans. The national AIM agenda focuses on spirituality, leadership, and sovereignty...

's Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier is a Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement . In 1977 he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for first degree murder in the shooting of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents during a 1975 conflict on the Pine...

. He is one of the founding members of Clarion Alley Mural Project collective and is still an active member as of 2006 as well as an occasional professor at The San Francisco Art Institute.
He has also designed several installations as part of the 2006 Liverpool Biennial. He is considered by some art critics and curators to be part of the first generation of the San Francisco Mission School

Mission School

The Mission School is an art movement of the 1990s and 2000s, centered in the Mission District of San Francisco, California.-History and characteristics:...

 art movement.

Rigo was born and raised on the Portuguese island of Madeira

Madeira

Madeira is a Portuguese archipelago that lies between and , just under 400 km north of Tenerife, Canary Islands, in the north Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of the European Union...

. He later established himself as an artist in San Francisco, earning a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute

San Francisco Art Institute

San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...

 in 1991 and an MFA from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in 1997. From 1984-2002, Rigo used the last two digits of the current year as part of his name, finally settling upon "23" in 2003.

Selected Awards

1991
Chauncey McKeever Award, San Francisco Art Institute

1994
WESTF/NEA Regional Fellowshipfor Visual Arts

1996
One Tree, Best Public Art Project of the Year, San Francisco Bay Guardian

1997
Stoli, San Francisco Arts Achievement Award
Secession Gallery, Visual Art Residency Fellowship Award, Taiwan

1998
SECA Art Award

SECA Art Award

The SECA Art Award is a contemporary art award program that has been administered by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and its auxiliary SECA since 1967 to honor San Francisco Bay Area artists. It includes an exhibition at SFMOMA, an accompanying catalogue, and a modest cash prize...

, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

1999
Biennal Award, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY

2006
Eureka Fellowship, Fleishhacker Foundation, CA

2007
Howard Fellowship, Brown University, Providence, RI;

Creative Work Fund, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, SF, CA

External links

• "Rigo 23", is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.
• "Rigo 90-something" by Timothy W Drescher, Shaping San Francisco Digital Library.
• "Hide and SECA" by Apollinaire Scherr, Metroactive, December 21, 1998. (Scroll down to section "This Space for 'Huh?'")
• "Underexposed Artists in the Spotlight", Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle
  San Francisco Chronicle
  thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
  
  , February 28, 1999.
• "In Full Site - Rigo 99", Loud Paper 3(2), 1999.
• "New and Venerable Institutions: Rigo" by Hank Donat, MisterSF.com, 2002.
• "Rigo Artwork", Interesting Thing of the Day, October 25, 2004.
• "Rigo 23: New Work", San Francisco Bay Guardian
  San Francisco Bay Guardian
  The San Francisco Bay Guardian is a free alternative newspaper published weekly in San Francisco, California. The paper is owned mostly by its publisher, Bruce B...
  
  , July 5, 2006.
• Works in the collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
  
  .