José Villalobos uses sculpture, photography, installation, and performance to interrogate and unsettle normative understandings of masculinity and Mexican American culture. The instruments and iconography of norteño culture play a prominent role in Villalobos’s work, either as found objects or sources of language, designs, and actions within his performances. Recent eight-foot sculptures like Angie and Eli (named for Villalobos’ siblings) twist and arc in patterns amplified from the intricate saddle-stitching found on cowboy boots like those made by Villalobos’s stepfather. Other designs are drawn from the embroidered shirts his father wore as a norteño musician. 

In Miami, Villalobos faced unexpected challenges of scale, shifting his focus from massive sculptural objects to more intimate experimentations that could take place in Fountainhead’s garage studios. “I took the opportunity while I was there to experiment with materiality,” he said. During his residency, Villalobos made large castings of leather-tooled belts in metal and resin, shaping and curling the cast belts by hand before they fully hardened. He also envisioned new lives for older objects in his collection, like a pair of white cowboy boots that he adorned with tangled, stringy rope fibers for the work Deeply Rooted in Machismo. 

When asked about a typical studio day, Villalobos said that wherever he is, he asks himself, “If I am here, what does the landscape look like with my body in it?” At his childhood home in the border town of El Paso, Texas, Villalobos reckons with his queer identity in the context of his family and community’s conservative religious and cultural values. In Miami, Villalobos found an entirely new cultural dynamic amidst vibrant Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican communities. “There are very different costumbres [between Latinx communities],” Villalobos described, ”[...]but the machismo is there for sure.”