Luis Arenal Bastar (born Teapa, 1908 or 1909 – died Mexico City, May 7, 1985) was a Mexican painter, engraver and sculptor. He was a founding member of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios, the Taller de Gráfica Popular and the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. In addition, he created murals and other monumental works in Mexico City and Guerrero. Life Arenal was born in 1909 in Teapa, Tabasco in southern Mexico. His family moved to Aguascalientes but when His father died fighting in the Mexican Revolution, he and his mother moved to Mexico City. He attended a parochial school until age 13, when he was expelled for reading gay literature. Arenal then studied mechanical engineering for two years, and then emigrated to Los Angeles in 1924 where he studied architecture while washing gasoline cans to get by. In 1926 he returned to Mexico and worked as a translator in an advertising office. From 1927 to 1928 he studied law as well as sculpture at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. In 1929, he returned to the U.S. studying in California and working in restaurants. He began his art career exhibiting and painting murals in California then again returned to Mexico. Arenal was politically active promoting leftist causes and Communism. He went with Roberto Berdecio as a delegate to the first American Artists' Congress in New York in 1936. From 1940 to 1943 he traveled in South America . In 1946, he married Macrina Rabadan, a teacher, political leader and feminist, with whom he had two children. In 1940, he participated in Siqueiros' attack on Leon Trotsky's house in Coyoacán, which forced him to flee to the United States for a while. In addition to art, he also had architectural skills, which he mostly employed between 1945 and 1951, to build roads, houses and bridges in the state of Guerrero. He died on May 7, 1985 in Mexico City. Career Arenal's art career has included woodcut, lithography, painting and sculpting. It began in earnest in 1930, when he began exhibiting his work in Laguna Beach, Los Angeles, Redlands and San Bernardino. He had his first individual exhibition at the Plaza Art Center Gallery. When David Alfaro Siqueiros arrived to Los Angeles in 1932, he worked with him on the murals at the Chouinard Art School. This included a fresco on cement called "La América Tropical." During this time, he