Rafael Francisco Salas earned his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2003 and his BA from Macalester College, St. Paul, MN in 1995. He is an associate professor of art at Ripon College, Ripon, WI. His oil paintings and drawings address rural America often from the complex point of view of being multiracial. Characterized by painterly, dark passages that dissolve into abstract fields, Salas paints farm fields, individuals seemingly bent by their toil, animals, and country fair beauty queens with a sense of romantic exhaustion and poetic longing. 

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Artist Statement

"My artwork reflects on American tradition and identity. It speaks to an indignant desire for a dream continually just beyond reach. It is a strange, rural poetry of aspiration and poignant reality, a striver’s endeavor of high and low culture, situated between the elevated and the abject.

Country music is the appropriate soundtrack."