Brief Biography of David Alfaro Siqueiros David Alfaro Siqueiros long affirmed that he was born in Santa Rosalia (today Camargo), in the state of Chihuahua, in 1896.  However, recent investigations call this date into question; Siqueiros' passports, for example, give birth dates of 1895, 1896, and 1899.  In 1913, after studying in religious schools in Mexico City, he enrolled in the Open Air School of Santa Anita, an institution affiliated with Mexico's official art academy.  In 1914 and 1915, during the Mexican Revolution, he served as secretary to General Manuel Dieguez and fought in several battles.  In 1917, he enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts, also in Mexico City.  There, in the following year, he exhibited his work for the first time.  In 1919, Siqueiros was sent to Europe as a military attaché, and lived there until 1922. From 1922 to 1924, Siqueiros worked as a muralist in the National Preparatory School, and founded El Machete, the official publication of the Syndicate of Painters, Sculptors, and Technical Workers, to which he contributed politically-inspired woodcuts.  In 1924, when his contracts were canceled, Siqueiros moved to Guadalajara, where he worked on a second mural program and eventually abandoned painting altogether to dedicate himself to union organization in the state of Jalisco.  His communist stance and intensive militancy led to his imprisonment in Mexico City's penitentiary in 1930. In November 1930, Siqueiros was released from prison under the condition that he remain under house arrest in the town of Taxco, Guerrero.  In January 1932, his first solo exhibition was held in Mexico City, and soon thereafter, he and his companion, the Uruguayan poet Blanca Luz Brum, left for Los Angeles.  In 1932, Siqueiros painted three murals in Los Angeles, and exhibited his work at the Stendahl Galleries in that city.  When his visa was not renewed, he and Brum left for South America, where he worked, lectured, and painted a mural in a private residence in Buenos Aires, entitled Plastic Exercise (1933).  In New York briefly in 1934, Siqueiros spent 1935 in Mexico City, and returned to New York in 1936, where he founded the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, a collective space closely affiliated with the Communist Party.  In 1937 and 1938 he again abandoned painting, serving in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War.  In 1939, back in Mexico, Siqueiros continued to work as a political activist, but also created an important series of paintings, most of which were exhibited in the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City in January of 1940.  Working with a team of artists on his first major mural in Mexico City, he produced Portrait of the Bourgeoisie for the headquarters of the Mexican Electricians' Union On the night of May 23, 1940, Siqueiros led an unsuccessful attack on the home of Leon Trotsky, then living in exile in Mexico City.  Siqueiros was sought by the police and eventually caught and arrested in August, after Trotsky's assassination by a second team.  Following his release in April 1941, Siqueiros left for Chile.  He spent the remainder of his life in his native country, Mexico, solidifying his position as one of the three great muralists in the country.  He died in 1974.