The son of Mexican immigrants who worked in plantation fields, both of his parents were deported by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2012, where his mother’s last job was as a housekeeper at a motel in Nogales, taking shifts of 12 hours every day. After the deportation of his parents, Zapata decided to leave the United States even though he was still a legal citizen, and in 2012 he moved to Culiacán, Sinaloa, where he began his artistic practice, which ranges from drawing and painting to performance and installation.
For Melanio, experiencing the loss of his fragile identity as a US citizen unleashed a disturbing and drastic change; he developed a radical discomfort, although humorous and sometimes furious, in relation to the injustice he suffered as a human being and as a member of an organic family. In his personality, this sentiment has been increasing as a result of the clear and brutal effects of foreign policy and Donald Trump’s behavior towards immigrants in general, but with Mexicans specifically.
Zapata’s work has been shown in various cultural institutions and art spaces throughout Mexico. In 2018, he participated in a group show at Licenciado entitled Los Peripatéticos. Other of his works were shown in the group exhibition Resistencias in 2017.
In 2021, he presented his second solo show entitled Bread or Revolution at Licenciado Gallery.
February 5, 2019 - April 5, 2019
Zapata conceived of Carpet Crawlers as a way to emotionally reconcile himself with the void left by his mother in his own life. But the work also reaches towards the existential parallel of migrant Mexican workers in the United States, whose lives remain hidden, plunged in everyday invisibility.
May 12, 2018 - July 1, 2018
Ridiculous and extravagant are but a few of the epithets that have been applied to The Peripatetics, who take off from an itinerant reflection to show their natural reaction to the world they experience.
