José Villalobos is a Texas-based multidisciplinary artist whose work moves across sculpture, installation, performance, photography, drawing, video, and fashion. Drawing from their upbringing along the United States–Mexico border in El Paso, Villalobos examines gender, masculinity, religion, cultural inheritance, and queer identity within the borderlands.
Villalobos was raised within a traditional, religiously conservative Mexican American family. Their practice responds to the tension between inherited expectations of masculinity and their own experience as a queer person. Rather than rejecting their cultural background, Villalobos works within its visual and material language, revealing both a deep connection to Norteño culture and the restrictive ideas of gender that can accompany it.
Cowboy hats, boots, belts, saddles, rope, animal hides, Western clothing, and rodeo equipment recur throughout Villalobos’s work. These objects traditionally communicate toughness, authority, labor, and masculine identity. Villalobos cuts, alters, paints, softens, embellishes, or places them into unexpected arrangements, shifting their meanings and exposing the vulnerability beneath their outward displays of strength.
The resulting works often move between beauty and discomfort, pride and critique, protection and exposure. Bright colors, polished surfaces, floral forms, decorative stitching, reflective materials, and lowrider aesthetics complicate objects commonly associated with conservative Western masculinity. Through this process, Villalobos challenges culturally accepted expressions of machismo while reclaiming materials that remain connected to family, heritage, and personal memory.
Performance is also central to Villalobos’s practice. By placing their own body within spaces historically shaped by heterosexual masculinity, the artist turns personal experience into a public challenge to established social structures. The body becomes a means of examining belonging, danger, resilience, visibility, and the pressure to perform culturally prescribed gender roles.
Born in El Paso in 1988, Villalobos received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at San Antonio. They received the Artist Lab Fellowship Grant for De La Misma Piel at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and were awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2018. Villalobos later completed a 2022 residency at the Joan Mitchell Center and received the Tanne Foundation Award.
In 2024, Villalobos participated in Artpace San Antonio’s International Artist-in-Residence program, where they developed groomed. The exhibition used sculpture and performance to address the effects of machismo, homophobia, inherited trauma, and circular patterns of thought. Branded cowhides, mirrors, grooming objects, and bodily references created a space in which Villalobos could resist aspects of their cultural inheritance while also recognizing its complexity and power.
In 2025, ASU Art Museum presented José Villalobos: Rough Rider, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Created following a residency with CALA Alliance, the exhibition focused on rodeo culture and its relationships to machismo, spectacle, protection, and performed gender. Villalobos transformed rodeo equipment and documented their own participation in bull riding, claiming space within a culture historically shaped by whiteness, masculinity, and homophobia.
Villalobos’s work has been exhibited at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, El Paso Museum of Art, Mexic-Arte Museum, NARS Foundation, El Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Museo de Arte de Querétaro, and Artpace. Their work has also appeared in Trans America/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today and the traveling exhibition Desert Rider: Dreaming in Motion.
Their work is held in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Mexic-Arte Museum, the City of San Antonio, Albright College, and Soho House International. José Villalobos lives and works in San Antonio and is represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery, where their work is available to Dallas art collectors interested in contemporary Texas art, Latinx art, performance, photography, and museum-collected artists.