Amero's career runs along the seam between two of the most important traditions of twentieth-century painting — the Mexican Renaissance and the postwar American printmaking revival — and he is one of the few artists whose teaching shaped both.
Amero came of age inside the most consequential moment in twentieth-century Mexican art. He was a young man in Mexico City when the post-Revolutionary state began commissioning the public murals that would define the Mexican Renaissance, and he was one of the first painters drawn into that programme — completing fresco panels representing the state shields of the Mexican Republic at the Secretaría de Educación Pública, and then working as one of the assistants to José Clemente Orozco on the frescoes of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. The technical and ideological discipline of the Mexican mural movement — its insistence on public scale, its synthesis of indigenous and modernist visual vocabularies, its commitment to a national subject — would underlie everything he subsequently made.
His first move outside Mexico took him through Cuba and into New York, where he lived through the late 1920s and developed the relationships with American printmakers, photographers, and filmmakers that would shape his later teaching. He befriended the poet Federico García Lorca during this period, and the two collaborated on a Surrealist film, Viaje a la Luna, for which Lorca wrote the script — one of several projects in which Amero pushed his practice into the new media of photography and cinema.
The decisive return to Mexico City placed him at the head of one of the most important printmaking workshops of the period. The lithography classes he established at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes drew a generation of artists who would themselves become central figures in twentieth-century Mexican art, and Amero's role as the working teacher of that group is one of the underappreciated stories of the period.
He returned permanently to the United States at the end of the 1930s, taking a position at the Cornish School in Seattle and then the professorship at the University of Oklahoma in Norman that would occupy the rest of his working life. The print workshop he built there became one of the leading American university programs in lithography, and his Oklahoma teaching extended the technical and aesthetic tradition of the Mexican Renaissance directly into the American Midwest. A mural by Amero remains at Kaufman Hall on the Oklahoma campus.
His position today is that of a hinge figure between the Mexican modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the postwar American printmaking world, and his work — paintings, lithographs, photographs, and his small but distinctive body of films — has continued to be reassessed as an important contribution to the broader hemispheric story of twentieth-century art. He died in Norman having spent more than thirty years in the United States but having remained throughout his career an artist of fundamentally Mexican formation.