Born at Hacienda El Refugio in the state of Guanajuato, Magaña fled a rural Mexico laid waste by the Revolution for Mexico City. He was fifty-six and a porter at the Coyoacán Open Air School of Painting with no formal art training when he turned out his first clay models and wood carvings. Mexico in that era was trying to forge a new identity that embraced nationalistic aspirations, popular culture, and the country´s pre-Hispanic heritage. The mandate of the Open Air Schools of Painting was to give students freedom to create, their sensibility and imagination unfettered by academic norms. Magaña´s innate gift for sculpture was noticed by Ignacio Asúnsolo, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, the gallery owner Inés Amor, and Diego Rivera, who helped arrange Magaña´s first solo show at the Palace of Fine Arts in 1930. mainly genre scenes with clusters of people and animals, the plain, rough-hewn figures of Magaña´s powerfully evocative works are oblivious to classic anatomical proportions, His Serpiente is part of the Rockefeller Center Collection in New York.
