René Yañez

René Yañez

René Yañez (19 September 1942 – 29 May 2018) was a Mexican assemblage artist, printmaker, performance artist, curator and community activist located in San Francisco, California. He was a well-known contributor to the arts of San Francisco and is a founder of Galería de la Raza, a non-profit community focused gallery that features Latino and Chicano artists and their allies. In the early 1970s he was one of the first curators in the United States to introduce Mexico’s Day of the Dead (in Spanish: Día de Muertos) as a contemporary focus and an important cultural celebration and curated one of the first exhibitions of Frida Kahlo’s work in the United States.