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thumb|right|250px|"Squatting Nude", at the [[Ilana Goor Museum.]]
thumb|A bronze sculpture by Francisco Zuniga, on the campus of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
José Jesús Francisco Zúñiga Chavarría (December 27, 1912 – August 9, 1998) was a Costa Rican-born Mexican artist, known both for his painting and his sculpture. Journalist Fernando González Gortázar lists Zúñiga as one of the 100 most notable Mexicans of the 20th century, while the Encyclopædia Britannica calls him "perhaps the best sculptor" of the Mexican political modern style.
Biography
Zúñiga was born in Guadalupe, Barrio de San José, Costa Rica on December 27, 1912, to Manuel Maria Zúñiga and María Chavarría, both sculptors. His father worked as a sculptor of religious figures, and in stone work. His artistic inclinations began early and by the age of twelve had already read books on the history of art, artistic anatomy and the life of various Renaissance painters. At age fifteen he began working in his father's shop. This experience sensitized him to shape and spaces. In 1926 he enrolled in the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Mexico, but left the following year to continue on his own. As part of his self-study, he studied German Expressionism and the writings of Alexander Heilmayer, through which he learned of the work of two French sculptors, Aristide Maillol and Auguste Rodin, coming to appreciate the idea of subordinating technique to expression. but the work caused controversy and the government rescinded its award.
In the early 1930s, he joined a wave of young artists with nationalist sensibilities in modern art and design. Together with number of other national artists including Teodorico Quirós and Fausto Pacheco, he helped create the so-called New Sensibility movement in Costa Rican art.
In the capital, his first contact with Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, who opened his library to Zúñiga. In 1958 he was awarded the first prize in sculpture from the Mexican National Institute of Fine Arts. the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Ponce Museum of Art in Puerto Rico, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.