Antonio Lechuga is a Dallas-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice operates at the intersection of art, architecture, design, storytelling, and social change. Moving between painting, sculpture, installation, collage, and textile-based work, he uses materials connected to everyday life to examine cultural memory, place, migration, labor, violence, and the Mexican American experience in Texas.
Central to Lechuga’s work is his experience as a Tejano living in the twenty-first century and his concern with the continued erasure of Mexican American histories. Through research, personal experience, architectural forms, and contemporary fabrication processes, he constructs narratives that acknowledge the complex history of the Texas–Mexico region while imagining possibilities for its future. His work considers how political decisions and social structures become visible within neighborhoods, buildings, borders, domestic materials, and individual lives.
Lechuga is particularly recognized for his use of cobijas, colorful mass-produced fleece blankets commonly found in Mexican American homes, markets, and street vendors. He cuts, layers, and sews fragments of the blankets together to create painterly compositions without relying on conventional paint. Their colors and printed imagery function as an existing palette, while their associations with warmth, family, protection, and home carry a deeper cultural significance. In Lechuga’s hands, the familiar material becomes both an image-making tool and a way of preserving personal and collective histories.
His earlier Fences series used cobijas to cover human-scale lattice structures resembling barriers along the United States–Mexico border. By wrapping the rigid forms in soft, protective fabric, Lechuga complicated familiar ideas of borders, safety, exclusion, and belonging. More recent sewn compositions move closer to collage and painting, combining fragments of existing imagery to depict landscapes, storefronts, figures, animals, and moments drawn from personal memory.
In Street Views, presented at Various Small Fires in Dallas in 2024, Lechuga focused on the family-owned businesses lining Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff. His sewn textile compositions documented storefronts, quinceañera shops, and other gathering places within the historically Black and Brown neighborhood. By translating these spaces into cobija fabric, Lechuga preserved their visual presence while considering the effects of gentrification, rising rents, invisible labor, and gradual neighborhood change.
Lechuga’s practice was also transformed by his experience of surviving a random shooting while running on the Santa Fe Trail in Dallas in 2022. During his recovery, he learned to sew and began constructing large-scale cobija collages. One of the first works created through this process depicted the landscape where the shooting occurred and was later acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art. His recovery and changing artistic process were featured in a 2026 episode of KERA’s Arts Docs.
Born in Dallas in 1985, Lechuga attended the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. His architectural training continues to inform his attention to structure, materials, scale, public space, and the built environment. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with presentations at the McNay Art Museum, the Blaffer Art Museum as part of the Texas Biennial, Ballroom Marfa, Various Small Fires, Oak Cliff Cultural Center, 500X Gallery, the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art, Arts Fort Worth, and galleries throughout Texas.
From July 2025 through March 2026, Lechuga was included in Los Encuentros at Ballroom Marfa alongside Justin Favela, Ozzie Juarez, Narsiso Martinez, and Yvette Mayorga. The exhibition brought together artists using familiar materials to address Latinx cultural experience, labor, borders, colonial histories, accessibility, and community. Lechuga created newly commissioned textile works informed by the landscape, history, and contemporary politics of Marfa and the surrounding border region.
Lechuga has received an Arts Activate Artist Grant from the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture and an artist grant from the Nasher Sculpture Center. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art and in private collections throughout the United States. He lives and works in Dallas and is represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery, where his work is available to Dallas art collectors interested in contemporary Texas art, textile-based practices, and artists represented in major museum collections.