Artist and designer Rafael Esquer has lived in Manhattan for more than 25 years. A native of the Sonora desert of Mexico, he was educated in Mexico City and Los Angeles. His design work has won the National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian National Design Museum. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Art and Design in New York and is included in the collections of several other museums, including the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the Denver Art Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Poster Museum in Poland, the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford University, and the Olympic Museum in Switzerland. Since 2004, Esquer runs Alfalfa Studio, his own creative practice. In 2007, Taschen named Esquer one of the world’s 100 most influential graphic designers working today (Charlotte and Peter Field, eds. “Contemporary Graphic Design”). He frequently serves as speaker and judge at international design events. Fueled by curiosity and a relentless desire to make the world a more beautiful place, in art and design, Esquer adheres to his own philosophy: Make the idea clear and simple, the design surprising and beautiful.