Jose Villalobos
San Antonio, Texas
Artist
Jose Villalobos is an artist who works in sculpture, performance, drawing, installation, and fashion. His art explores the challenges he faced as a gay man growing up in a conservative religious household in the border town of El Paso, influenced by both traditional Mexican customs and more permissive American mores. In his work, Villalobos protests the toxicity of machismo through the use of familiar objects that reflect the norteño culture such as boots and cowboy hats. He playfully and pointedly deconstructs their masculine symbolism by literally taking them apart and adding glitzy rhinestones and fringe. Although new forms are created, the objects express the battle between self-acceptance as a maricón and the assimilation of traditional expectations of gender performance. Villalobos has exhibited widely and is a past recipient of the Artist Lab Fellowship Grant and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant.
This bio/description was originally published in 2020 and updated in 2020. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).