CASSILS is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.

They are the recipient of a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California CommunityFoundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerousVisual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Wired, TheGuardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalogSolutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020). Cassils's work was recently acquired by the Victoria Albert Museum, London, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum.

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6:00 p.m., in person, Kopleff Recital Hall, 15 Gilmer St.

José Villalobos’s multi-media practice objects and disrupts culturally accepted stereotypes of toxic masculinity. Villalobos grew up on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, TX, and was raised in a traditional and religiously conservative family. His work reconciles the identity challenges in his life, caught in between traditional Mexican customs and American mores, as well as growing up with religious ideals that conflict and condemn being gay. Villalobos confronts the derogatory terms and attitudes that he continues to withstand today. The root of Villalobos’s work lies in the performativity of his identity. His accouterments are proud connections to his heritage but are also reminders of the hate and homophobia that he has had to endure. Villalobos manipulates material through the context of self-identity as he examines gender roles within family culture. He demonstrates that dismantling traditional modes of masculine identity centers an interstitial space where materiality softens virility. Villalobos protests the toxicity of machismo using objects, specifically within the norteño culture, that carry a history by deconstructing and altering them. Although new forms are created, he demonstrates the battle between the acceptance of being a maricón and assimilating to the cultural expectations.

José Villalobos grew up on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, TX. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was awarded the Artist Lab Fellowship Grant for his work De La Misma Piel at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. Villalobos is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant Award and Residency and is also a recipient of the Tanne Foundation Award. His work has been exhibited in the nationally recognized exhibition Trans America/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX; ArtPace, San Antonio, TX; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; NARS Foundation, New York, NY; the Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX; El Paso Museum of Art, TX; El Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and The Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX. He has two upcoming group exhibitions, one at the Phoenix Art Museum: Desert Rider, curated by Gilbert Vicario, and Xican-a.o.x. Body at The American Federation of Arts in New York curated by Marisa del Toro, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Gilbert Vicario.
José Villalobos’s work is included in the collection of Mexic-arte Museum, Austin, TX, the City of San Antonio Public Collection, TX, Albright College, Reading, PA, and Soho House International in Austin, TX.

Jose Villalobos is currently represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery