José Villalobos

Semillas

Semillas is a new body of work that contextualizes the pressure put on men, especially amongst the Latinx community, of continuing their lineage. Just like many other individuals in the LGBTQ+ community, Villalobos's existence as queer is often referred to as a waste as it breaks the norm of “traditional” human procreation, creating an abrupt stop to the continuation of their bloodline and family name, as their sexuality and potency are challenged. 

José Villalobos’s multi-media practice objects and disrupts culturally accepted stereotypes of toxic masculinity. Villalobos grew up on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, TX, and was raised in a traditional and religiously (Evangelical) 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 and condemn being gay. Villalobos confronts the derogatory terms and attitudes that he continues to withstand today. The root of Villalobos’s work lies in the performativity of his identity. His accouterments are proud connections to his heritage but are also reminders of the hate and homophobia that he has had to endure. Villalobos manipulates material through the context of self-identity as he examines gender roles within family culture. He demonstrates that dismantling traditional modes of masculine identity centers an interstitial space where materiality softens virility. Villalobos protests the toxicity of machismo through the use of objects, specifically within the norteño culture, that carry a history by deconstructing and altering them. Although new forms are created, he demonstrates the battle between the acceptance of being a maricón and assimilating to the cultural expectations. 

Villalobos received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was awarded the Artist Lab Fellowship Grant for his work De La Misma Piel at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. Villalobos is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant Award and Residency and is also a recipient of the Tanne Foundation Award. His work has been exhibited in the nationally recognized exhibition, Trans America/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX; the Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX; El Paso Museum of Art, TX; El Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and The Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX.