Artist Talk and Dialogue: José Villalobos and Raquel Gutiérrez

Join the Bi-Co Environmental Studies Department, LAILS Program, Literatures in English, History of Art Department, and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program for an Artist Talk and Dialogue with José Villalobos and Raquel Gutiérrez.

José Villalobos is known for artistically protesting culturally-accepted traits of toxic masculinity through performance, installation, sculpture, drawings, and fashion. Villalobos grew up on the U.S./Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, and was raised in a traditional conservative family. His work reconciles the identity challenges in his life, caught in between traditional Mexican customs and American mores, as well as growing up with religious ideals that conflict with being gay. His work engages with historically charged objects associated with the landscapes and cultures of the Texas borderlands, like the tools used by Mexican braceros who were exploited by the U.S. agricultural system, decorating and placing them in new contexts to point to the absence of queer lives in existing archives. 

Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic/writer, poet, and educator. They have published many essays in recent years on the work of Latinx artists, mostly in Southern California. Gutiérrez's essay writing also explores the effects that gentrification (sometimes in the name of sustainability and environmentalism) has had on Latinx LGBTQ+ life and culture in the built environments of Los Angeles.

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