Jose Guadalupe Sanchez III is an interdisciplinary artist with an emphasis on painting. His work is an investigation of the interactions between different value systems found throughout Los Angeles, with a focus on intelligence, legitimacy, and authority. A driving question in his practice asks, “how as artists can we make work that, on the one hand, validates the neglected experiences of the people we care about (i.e., through direct positive representation and intervention) and, on the other, be a critical reflection on those structures that created the conditions of making a people socially, politically, economically invisible?” His projects manifest as pedagogical interventions as an arts educator for marginalized youth, paintings, performance, video, documentary video, and his socially engaged art practice.

@theotrajose

José Guadalupe Sánchez II, a Mexican-American artist from Los Angeles, often confronts issues of machismo, colonialism, labor, and the body in his work. In this series of three portraits mixing elements of performance, painting, and collage, Sánchez honors the elders of his family who have passed on. Standing five feet tall, these life-size depictions of Sánchez’s cousin, grandma, and great-aunt are adorned with cellophane paper, cut to resemble the rounded edges of the decorative Mexican papel picado. Thinking about how our elders occupy space after they have passed on, the three figures are depicted in their daily acts; sitting down, posing for a picture, leaning on a loved one. Within each painting depicting his relatives, Sánchez incorporates sketches of walls and corners within to showcase the home in relation to the corporeal and spiritual body. Accompanied by a video interview between Sánchez and his brothers entitled, We Heal in Los Rios.

Sánchez interviews his brothers on their relationship to their late father. Through the interview and these three paintings, Sánchez contemplates the ways in which machismo in Latinx society has disallowed men from being sensitive, mourning, and healing. – Leah Perez