Cande Aguilar
Born 1972, Brownsville, Texas
Lives in Brownsville, Texas

Cande Aguilar is a self-taught artist and musician who uses his distinctive BarrioPOP style to reflect on border culture. Aguilar began his musical career at age ten and recorded his first album by age 13. He toured the US and won numerous awards well before completing his first painting in 1999. He has since created a remarkable collection of works, including large-scale paintings, collages, digital works, and sculptures. Aguilar defines BarrioPOP as an amalgamation of characters, colors, and street phenomena inspired by popular culture and border politics, a product of his experience living and working in the Rio Grande Valley.

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Francis Almendárez
Born 1987, Los Angeles, California
Lives in Los Angeles, California

Francis Almendárez is an artist, filmmaker, and educator whose work explores the intersections of history, identity, and cultural production. Through his personal experiences as a member of intergenerational immigrant families, he addresses memory and trauma, particularly those of marginalized communities in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Diasporas. Almendárez's work ranges from filmic installations to performance and text, incorporating music and storytelling to highlight themes such as (post)colonialism, migrant labor, and gender roles. With a unique perspective as both an insider and outsider, he transforms personal narratives into political and poetic works that challenge dominant Western narratives and re-historicize alterity.

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Fernando Andrade
Born 1987, Acuña, México
Lives in San Antonio, Texas

Fernando Andrade was born in 1987 in the border town of Acuña, Mexico. He has lived in San Antonio, Texas since he was seven years old. As an artist, Andrade has two distinct bodies of work. His figurative drawings explore the events taking place in his native homeland, while his abstract paintings are vehicles for nurturing feelings of hopeful joy and optimism. His latest work, Suspended Thoughts, focuses on the narrative state of mind during the COVID-19 pandemic. Andrade uses contrasting mediums to capture mental health struggles by creating a pause in time through suspended bodies in an abstract space.

 

Violette Bule
Born 1980, Valencia, Venezuela
Lives in Houston, Texas
Violette Bule is a Venezuelan-Lebanese conceptual artist whose work analyzes issues of migration, identity, memory, violence, community engagement, digital technologies, and the reality of contemporary social and economic vulnerability as tools for creative and political empowerment. Often, her work engages spectators through playful scenarios, prompting them to consider their position as unwitting agents of systemic oppression and polarizing discourse. Her interactive sculpture, Slam the Dreamers, addresses the intersection between immigration, incarceration, and corporate capitalism in the USA, where powerful interests profit from criminalizing undocumented migrants. Bule uses a high striker game to highlight the exploitation of migrants by well-known corporations.

 

Angel Cabrales
Born 1973, El Paso, Texas
Lives in El Paso, Texas

Angel Cabrales, an artist and Assistant Professor of Sculpture in El Paso, Texas. Everything is an artistic resource to Angel, while his expansive understanding of materials and styles allows the concepts to dictate his approach to creation, making evolution and amelioration intrinsic to his philosophy. He inherited his passion for science and engineering from his father, a retired White Sands Missile Range engineer. While his mother, a politically active stay-at-home mom, taught him the value of community and social work through volunteerism. His work amalgamates his experience and upbringing in the Borderlands, resulting in social/political commentary with an engineered flare.

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Sara Cardona
Born 1971, Mexico City, México
Lives in Dallas, Texas

Sara Cardona is a mixed-media artist born in Mexico City and currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas. She uses the analog cut-and-paste process to create collages in the tradition of early twentieth-century assemblage and a nod to the film editing process. These collages are then developed into the foundation for large-scale sculptures in paper and metal, inspired by the idea of distributive human networks of capital and consumption. As an artist who grew up in a family heavily involved in the film and theater industry, her practice is informed by the intersection of artifice, spectacle, photography, and scenic construction.

 

Christian Cruz
Born 1989, Dallas, Texas
Lives in Dallas, Texas

Christian Cruz is a multimedia artist whose work spans sculpture, performance, installation, video, and photography. Through her work, Pink Collar // Children's Linen, Cruz symbolically depicts the tedious labor of care-oriented workers. In the durational performance, Cruz faces a corner wall while delicately balancing six laundry baskets stacked on her head. As the performance progresses, her sense of confinement and stoic composure takes a toll on Cruz, causing her to drop the stacked baskets and try again. This poignant piece underscores the immeasurable demands of pink-collar workers, their vulnerability to public scrutiny, and their noble perseverance at a futile task.

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Jenelle Esparza
Born 1985, Corpus Christi, Texas
Lives in San Antonio, Texas

Jenelle Esparza is an interdisciplinary artist who examines the lesser-known history of cotton and labor in South Texas. Through photography and textiles, Esparza's work considers a variety of themes, including body movement, gender, culture, identity, and race. She utilizes found objects and materials to explore the connection between landscapes and bodily experiences while delving into the implications of generational trauma, using repurposed heirlooms and cotton textiles to reexamine her family's generation's long relationship to the land through cotton farming. Through her research and artistic engagement, Esparza's artwork bears witness to a history of violence and racial injustices in South Texas.

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Christopher Nájera Estrada
Born 1992, Salinas, California
Lives in Fort Worth, Texas

Christopher Nájera Estrada is an artist who explores the intersectionality of his identity as a gay Chicanx man. Growing up in a conservative religious community, Nájera was subjected to oppression, shame, and guilt. He now confronts and rejects gender roles and harmful faith-based ideologies within his culture through his mixed media artwork. Nájera's approach to his work is one of appreciation and tenderness, creating a space where intersectionality is recognized and reinterpreted to celebrate diversity. Influenced by the current cultural zeitgeist, spirituality, and Chicanx roots, his autobiographical work aims to heal intergenerational trauma and accept the juxtapositions in his identity.

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Melissa Gamez-Herrera
Born 1991, San Antonio, Texas
Lives in San Antonio, Texas

Melissa Gamez-Herrera is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, bookmaking, printmaking, and other multimedia practices. Melissa's work speaks to identity, community, and justice issues. Her research into events related to human rights violations and the ability of art to create a pathway to collective healing is reflected in her Women Workers of the Borderlands series. This ongoing project captures the portraits and recorded testimonies of women workers involved in labor rights advocacy within the context of Mexico's maquiladora industry, who she met through Comité Fronterizo de Obreras. The empowerment and increased visibility of these workers are central to her practice.

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Omar González
Born 1986, Kingsville, Texas
Lives in Rockport, Texas

Omar González is a sixth-generation Tejano, printmaker, and adjunct art professor who grew up in South Texas. His family ties in Mexico allow González to explore the history inherited and lost through time and explore identity by questioning the expectations passed down from generation to generation. Gonzalez creates iconography through autobiographical depictions of his rural upbringing set within the framework of the household. He uses his work to emphasize how early development influences and shapes a person's life, creating a dialogue around these experiences, raising questions about authority, gender roles, the interplay of power within a family, and generational bonds.

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Raul de Lara
Born 1991, Culiacán, Sinaloa, México
Lives in Ridgewood, New York

Raul De Lara immigrated to the US from Mexico when he was 12 and has been a DACA recipient since 2012. Raised in Texas as a non-English speaker, feeling neither from here nor there, his work reflects on ideas of nationality, language barriers, body language, and the sense of touch. His sculptures explore how stories, folklore, and rituals can be silently communicated through inanimate objects, tools, and foreign environments. De Lara often works with wood, a material that always shows the passing of time on its skin. The shared backyard between the US and Mexico inspires his aesthetics and materials.

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Ingrid Leyva
Born 1987, Chihuahua, Chihuahua, México
Lives in El Paso, Texas

Ingrid Leyva is a transborder Chicana and lesbian artist from El Paso, Ciudad Juárez, and Las Cruces. Her work addresses representation, systemic violence, and identity through portraiture and video narratives. Her work, "Sisters," explores the complex relationship between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, sister cities connected despite their border separation. Through a thought-provoking dual-screen video, Leyva challenges stereotypes of border living, presenting a candid reel of daily life on both sides while engaging in a contentious dialogue with her real-life sister, Maryté. Leyva's art offers a space to transcend conventional meaning and typical interpretations and perceptions of the border experience.

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Ruben Luna
Born 1974, San Antonio, Texas
Lives in San Antonio, Texas

Ruben Luna, also known as ‘GachoStyle,’ is a self-taught artist born and raised in the South Side of San Antonio, Texas. Luna's artwork explores Rasquachismo as an art form, drawing inspiration from the creative challenge of generating new mixed-media objects through problem-solving techniques, often incorporating crude or common materials. With innovative and nostalgic tributes, Luna pays homage to the people, phrases, and things of his hometown's working-class Mexican American communities. At its core, his work reveals resourcefulness and the ability to "make do." Each piece prioritizes function over aesthetics and combines inventiveness, ingenuity, and improvisation with personal and cultural narratives.

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Alejandro Macias
Born 1987, Brownsville, Texas
Lives in Tucson, Arizona

Alejandro Macias was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas. His work draws inspiration from the fusion of Mexican and American cultures that define the Rio Grande Valley. His art mirrors his upbringing and the division he felt living along the U.S./ Mexico border and explores topics surrounding Mexican-American identity, immigration, cultural misconceptions, marginalization, and the ever-shifting American political landscape. Macias's work challenges traditional and contemporary approaches, using figurative, abstract techniques and multimedia to capture the duality of his identity. Through his art, he seeks to better understand his Mexican-American background and raise awareness of border concerns and contemporary socio-political issues.

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Chris Marin
Born 1994, Lubbock, Texas
Lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Chris Marin is a Mexican American artist whose upbringing in Texas profoundly influenced his understanding of daily life and relationships. Currently studying and observing Judaism, his research focuses on the input and output of identity. Marin's artwork is centered on storytelling, with a unique approach that blends plot elements and traditional album structure and often inspired by quotes by comedians and rappers. Marin's compositions are laden with imagery overlapping transparent and opaque layers, and his use of materials expands the definition of painting. His work incorporates history and personal experiences and explores identity through markers of skin, clothing, and language.

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Gabo Martinez
Born 1995, Tarimoro, Guanajuato, México
Lives in San Marcos, Texas

Gabo Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the interplay between surface and form, carving patterns and lettering onto vessel forms inspired by her Mexican identity. Utilizing traditional and contemporary motifs, Martinez crafts a narrative that reclaims and honors her heritage. She combines the mediums of printmaking and ceramics to create spaces that evoke the warmth of brown bodies with rich, vibrant colors. These spaces become vehicles for the reclamation of a historical clay body, known as barro rojo, in the contemporary moment, elevating ancestral ceramic technologies. Barro Rojo lends its softness and malleability to immortalize cultures and narratives further.

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Gabriel Martinez
Born 1973, Alamogordo, New México
Lives in Houston, Texas

Gabriel Martinez is an artist and musician from Alamogordo, NM. He lives and works in Houston, Texas, where he has operated the experimental art space Alabama Song for the last eleven years. His art addresses relationships produced by the built environment and the body's experience of history. Through the use of found materials and politics of specific contexts, his artwork explores the conditions of environmental injustice, which disproportionately affect working-class Black and Brown bodies. His hand-sewn paintings, made from garments found in the city streets, situate the artist as one body among many involved in the manipulation of the material.

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Tina Medina
Born 1975, Lubbock, Texas
Lives in Dallas, Texas

Tina Medina is an artist, educator, and curator based in Dallas, Texas. Originally from West Texas, her artwork reflects the underrepresented voices in her communities, such as people of color, farm and domestic workers, and the undocumented, especially women and children. Through her exploration of fiber, painting, and mixed media, Medina's work contemplates the contributions of millions of Migrant families like hers who helped build this country and brings awareness to that generation's hard work and sacrifices. Medina's work is a reminder of the complexities of identity and belonging and the importance of cultivating understanding and acknowledging diverse perspectives.

 

Juan de Dios Mora
Born 1984, Yahualica, Jalisco, México
Lives in San Antonio, Texas

Juan de Dios Mora is an artist and educator who immigrated to the US in 1998. Mora's art focuses on relief printmaking techniques that tell stories of the Mexican American experience. Living in Laredo, Texas, along the US/Mexico border, opened Mora's eyes to social and political concepts that heavily influence his aesthetic and ideology. His experiences in the US, with its traditions, racism, and stereotypes, gave him a firsthand look at the reality of being an immigrant in a foreign country. Mora's work is both representational and surreal, portraying the Mexican American scenes and iconography paired with sentimental, satirical, and comical themes.

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Arely Morales
Born 1990, Jalisco, México
Lives in Nacogdoches, Texas

Arely Morales is an artist born in Mexico who moved to Texas at 14. Her larger-than-life paintings highlight the identity, humanity, and vulnerability of the overlooked immigrant workforce in the United States. Through her portraits, Morales reveals the emotional complexity and psychological depth of the struggles and experiences that often go unseen. She focuses on class-based exploitation and immigrant workers' physical and emotional suffering. Morales' work provides an intimate view into the lives of these workers and their communities. In doing so, Morales hopes to increase understanding of their important contributions to this country and offer the recognition they deserve.

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Francisco Moreno
Born 1986, Mexico City, México
Lives in Dallas, Texas

Francisco Moreno is a Mexican-American artist who finds inspiration in the works of European Old Masters coupled with an understanding and appreciation of Mexican ancestry and symbolism. His paintings and installations create enigmatic environments using baroque and camouflage-inspired strategies. Introducing sci-fi and fantasy elements, Moreno invents an imaginative narrative that blends centuries seamlessly. A surreal ensemble of figures and elements comes alive within the artist's work, transcending the boundaries of time and space. From futuristic visions to historical symbolism, from mythological allusions to global perspectives, the work teems with a vibrant tapestry of ideas and narratives that stir the imagination.

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Patrick McGrath Muñiz
Born 1975, New York, New York
Lives in New Territory, Texas

Patrick McGrath Muñiz is an artist from Puerto Rico living in Texas who uses oil paintings and retablos to explore issues of colonialism, consumerism, and climate change. Muñiz's work uses Renaissance painting techniques to emulate indoctrination strategies from the time of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Through satirical narratives and anachronisms, he reflects on the colonial roots of our current consumer culture and the corporate agenda with its Neo-colonial ramifications and environmental consequences. His recent work is layered with personal stories that incorporate Tarot cards, one of the few things recovered from his childhood home before Hurricane Maria.

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Benjamin Muñoz
Born 1993, Corpus Christi, Texas
Lives in Dallas, Texas

Benjamin Muñoz is a primarily self-taught Dallas-based multi-disciplinary artist. His studio practice spans painting, installation, and monumental printmaking, creating works reflecting his Mexican heritage and upbringing. His compositions are often arranged in a stack, symbolizing the importance and dependence on previous generations and their ties to the present and future. For Muñoz, the concept is that future generations can achieve things that were out of reach for prior ones. His suite of six woodcuts, The Endless Endeavor, explores his family's history, starting with his grandfather's arrival in the US from Mexico City and ending with the birth of his daughters.

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Marianna T. Olague
Born 1990, El Paso, Texas
Lives in El Paso, Texas

Marianna Olague captures the beauty of everyday life in El Paso. Finding inspiration in the familiar and mundane is central to Olague's work. She composes brilliantly hued portraits of people and places that hold significance to her. La Frontera, ever present in the work, lingers in the background of her paintings. It takes shape as a fence or rock wall that offers protection and privacy to her subjects but ultimately delineates their inescapable socioeconomic condition. Olague's work celebrates the low-income Mexican American community she grew up in with intricate detail and realistic depictions, highlighting the unconventional beauty of this region.

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Joe Peña
Born 1971, Laredo, Texas
Lives in Corpus Christi, Texas

Joe Peña is an artist and a Professor of Art in Corpus Christi, Texas. His paintings and drawings explore elements of ethnic identity, including cultural, familial, and social constructs relating to his Mexican heritage. The subject matter, portrayed through various aspects of still life, portraiture, and urban nightscapes, are a further reference and exploration into personal narratives and traditional and contemporary Mexican customs. Peña's current works explore Nightscapes, intimate, vibrant interpretations based on food trucks, storefronts, and other similar establishments used as a metaphor for the notion of home as an internal sense of place, not merely a physical location.

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Jaylen Pigford
Born 1996, Corpus Christi, Texas
Lives in Houston, Texas

Jaylen Pigford is an Afro-Latino painter born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, and currently based in Houston, Texas. The son of an African American father and a mother of Mexican descent, Pigford is a self-taught artist who has honed his craft since childhood. His work fuses vibrant colors and symbolic imagery to explore the balance between light and darkness. His paintings are personal and autobiographical, reflecting his experiences of adversity and self-growth. Through his uplifting art, Pigford reminds us that no matter how challenging our circumstances may be, there is always hope, and how we respond to adversity defines us.

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Vick Quezada
Born 1979, El Paso, Texas
Lives in Western Massachusetts

Vick Quezada is an interdisciplinary artist who explores hybrid forms in Indigenous-Latinx history and the function of these histories in contested lands, primarily at the US/Mexico Border. Quezada is a Rascuache artist who repurposes and stylizes found objects through video, performance, sculpture, and ceramics, incorporating bricks, trash, chains, barbed wire, and natural elements like soil, flora, and corn. Quezada’s work explores liberation through an approach rooted in queer and Indigenous knowledge, histories, and aesthetics. They draw on an Aztec-Nahuan religious doctrine that affirms a “two-spirit” tradition to make the Latinx and Indigenous transgender body visible through history, trauma, and pleasure.

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Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez
Born 1984, Glenarden, Maryland
Lives in Pearland, Texas

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez is a Salvadoran American artist from PG County, Maryland. Her practice utilizes the language of photography with site-specific installations, videos, and text. Her work centers on memory, personal and historical amnesia, and its ties to the Central American diaspora. To reconcile with her personal and cultural histories, she creates work to validate truth, false memories, and filtered history to better understand the relationships between neighboring nations, cultures, and personal and familial bonds. Her work raises questions about historical events and investigates gaps in those narratives, both culturally and personally sourcing ideas and inspiration from various personal and media archives.

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Josué Ramírez
Born 1989, Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas, México
Lives in McAllen, Texas

Josué Ramírez is an artist who draws inspiration from the people and places of the Rio Grande Valley. In his multidisciplinary practice, he explores personal identity and its interconnectedness with the Texas/Mexico border where he grew up. Ramírez's installations, crafts, videos, and performances reference popular culture, traditional Mexican iconography, bilingualism, and the rasquache aesthetic of the region. His pieces, like The Myth of Affordability and Portrait of a Gentrifier, comment on housing conditions, gentrification, displacement, and inequity affecting South Texas neighborhoods. Additionally, works such as Gentrified Houses and American Family Bust address the evolution of housing and the nuclear family.

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Natalia Rocafuerte
Born 1993, Ciudad Del Carmen, Campeche, México
Lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan

Natalia Rocafuerte is a video artist raised on both sides of the Rio Grande Border in Matamoros and Brownsville. Rocafuerte's studio practice explores technology as a medium of psychological reflection, immigration, duality, and borders. Her recent work focuses on creating a stream of audio and visual consciousness by listening to or watching the dreams of immigrant women surveyed through a year-long dream hotline. Her work questions the complexity of identity and how our place of origin is stamped into our memories and current existence. Combining soundscapes, immersive video, and rasquache aesthetics, Rocafuerte analyzes dreams through media as a psychodynamic tool.

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Gil Rocha
Born 1977, Laredo, Texas
Lives in Laredo, Texas

Gil Rocha is a contemporary artist and curator from Laredo, Texas. He uses various techniques, including assemblage, painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, to express the lexicon of the Mexican American border and the social/political issues that arise from it. His current series of works utilize a Rascuache aesthetic that is inventive and utilitarian. His works often include Spanglish words and phrases, combined with an assortment of discarded everyday objects that hold a deep personal meaning to create familiar structures that convey the narratives of things we carry physically and emotionally. Despite their crude appearance, his works are playful, evocative, and thought-provoking.

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Eva Marengo Sanchez
Born 1990, San Antonio, Texas
Lives in San Antonio, Texas

Eva Marengo Sanchez is an artist best known for her paintings of food that highlight its importance in our lives. Each artwork is meticulously crafted, paying attention to scale and composition, each representing moments and themes in her life that tell a larger story about geography, identity, and culture. Eva's interest in the ability of objects to tell stories is central to her practice, thoughtfully selecting and depicting deeply personal and meaningful subjects. Sanchez's paintings record a particular moment in time and place, highlighting the importance of family, the comforts of home, and the power of faith in challenging times.

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Marco Sánchez
Born 1983, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México
Lives in El Paso, Texas

Marco Sánchez is a professor and visual artist who grew up between the binational cities of Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. Sánchez specializes in printmaking but is also well-versed in oil painting, drawing, woodworking, and mixed media. His work investigates various topics, including his relationship with his mentors and peers, his cultural background, folklore, and blue-collar laborers. His work intends to honor and dignify people who have often found themselves on the margins of society. Sánchez is currently working on two series highlighting various cultural phenomena, including a dance series focusing on precolonial groups' importance throughout México and Mesoamerica.

 

Ashley Elaine Thomas
Born 1984, Corpus Christi, Texas
Lives in Corpus Christi, Texas

Ashley Elaine Thomas is an artist known best for her remarkable laborious graphite drawings on paper. Thomas' works portray precious relics that, in some instances, may often go overlooked or under-appreciated, which she delicately renders with dream-like realism, showcasing her technical skill and meticulous mark-making. Thomas' drawings have deep personal significance, depicting items collected and cherished over time, including candles, books, jewelry, shells, and more. She creates an autobiographical archive of her life and experiences through her art. Composition is deliberate and critical in Thomas' work, as she carefully arranges her subjects to create an astonishing world on the page.

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Bella Maria Varela
Born 1993, Washington DC
Lives in Austin, Texas

Bella Maria Varela is an artist based in Austin, Texas, who grew up in inner-city Washington, D.C. In her work, she explores themes of immigration, family, and gender identity using video, installation, and photography. Her practice is informed by the resourceful and resilient legacy of immigrant hustlers, which inspires her to collect and transform found objects and images. Bella pulls from her personal archive of video footage, thrifted souvenirs, and San Marcos blankets to create physical gaps that invite new interpretations and hybrid identities. Her art constructs a new iconography that reflects her unique experience as a queer, first-generation Guatemalan American.

 

José Villalobos
Born 1988, El Paso, Texas
Lives in San Antonio, Texas

José Villalobos's work challenges toxic masculinity and traditional cultural stereotypes. Raised conservatively on the US/Mexico border, his work reconciles the identity between Mexican customs, American mores, and being queer. Villalobos confronts derogatory attitudes, embodying his identity through personal artifacts that simultaneously honor his heritage and symbolize the homophobia he has had and continues to endure. By deconstructing Norteño cultural objects, he dismantles traditional notions of masculinity, revealing a vulnerable space where strength coexists. Protesting the objects' connection to a history of machismo by repurposing them, creating new forms demonstrating the battle between accepting being maricón and assimilating to cultural expectations.

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Sarah Zapata
Born 1988, Corpus Christi, Texas
Lives in Brooklyn, New York

Sarah Zapata is a textile artist exploring multigenerational Peruvian feminine crafts through her intricate, labor-intensive fiber work. Zapata creates vividly colored handwoven sculptures, installations, and rug-like canvases using manual processes combined with modern and industrial manufacturing techniques from both Peruvian weaving and American rug-making traditions. Zapata's fabric works are contemporary abstracted objects that tackle issues of gender, ethnicity, colonialism, labor, cultural relativism, and performativity, inspired by her heritage and feminist theory. Zapata's work is a blend of traditional craft and fine art, past and present, reflecting her intersectional identity as a queer Peruvian-American raised in a religious household in Texas.

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Jasmine Zelaya
Born 1983, Pasadena, Texas
Lives in Houston, Texas

Jasmine Zelaya is a multi-disciplinary first-generation Honduran-American visual artist. Her perspective is shaped by her parents, who immigrated to the US in the early 1970s. The aesthetic of that period inspires her portraiture that explores themes of identity, assimilation, and the brown body, often through a familial narrative rich with symbolism. Her style of vivid painterly surfaces distracts from underlying tensions reflected in the gaze of her subjects. Her use of floral embellishments is a graphic representation of her family story, contrasting the natural and artificial world while examining how outward manipulations of our appearance can alter our sense of self.