Brief Bio

 Born and raised in East Los Angeles, John Zender Estrada experienced a rich and diverse cultural environment drawing from the strong personalities of the Chicano youth around him. At fifteen he lived in Mexico City where he gained a love and respect for Los Tres Grandes, the famous Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.  He attended Otis Art Institute majoring in Fine Art and Illustration.  John was influenced by the New York art scene, primarily the abstract-graffiti-pop expressionists. Actively involved in establishing the Los Angeles style of graffiti art, John was one of the many early pioneers that created the graffiti movement in the early eighties. John recreated himself as Zender One (the rising mountain) and had his first one- man show at Otis titled "Zender-Neo Expression" in 1987.  

He would begin his professional art career with the graffiti art on canvas.  His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zero-1 Gallery, CSDI, ICU Gallery and many others. He has had several one man shows and many group shows, exhibiting with many other well-known Graffiti artists such as Retna, Chaz, Mear, Futura 2000, and many others.

Deeply committed to making public art Zender has produced over 300 murals in Los Angeles and throughout the United States. He created many brush murals in East Los Angeles which led him to create a large body of Chicano art. Exhibiting with David Botello, Wayne Healy, Vladimir Cora, George Yepes and many others.

John Zender Moved into yet another art genre of Spiritual Abstractions in 2007 and was represented by a gallery in Whittier CA.