Brick is pleased to present an iteration of the first significant survey of Jose Villalobos’ work Joto Fronterizo/ Border Faggot as a one day event as part of San Antonio’s DREAMWEEK. Villalobos is a multidisciplinary artist who works with installation art, performance, sculpture, and drawing. This contemporary crossing of disciplinary artistic boundaries through his varied choice of media, is also explored through his crossing of gendered, sexual, linguistic, and cultural borders. His artworks reflect on themes of toxic masculinity, queer identities, and the difficulties he has himself encountered, Although new forms are created he demonstrates the battle between the acceptance being a maricón and assimilating to the cultural expectations.
Jose Villalobos grew up on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, TX, and was raised in a traditional conservative family. Villalobos received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2016. He was awarded the Artist Lab Fellowship Grant that same year for his work De La Misma Piel at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. Villalobos recently earned a Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Award and Residency and is also a recipient of the Tanne Foundation Award. His work was featured in the nationally recognized exhibition, Trans America/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today at the McNay Art Museum. Villalobos has exhibited and performed at the Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX; El Paso Museum of Art, TX; El Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; among other institutions and galleries nationwide.
