Born in 1954 to immigrant working-class Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn, New York, Juan Sánchez is one of the most significant Nuyorican visual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Sánchez emerged as a central figure within a generation of artists using diverse media to explore ethnic, racial, and national identity as well as social justice in the 1980s and 90s. While Sánchez first gained recognition for his large multi-layered mixed-media collage paintings addressing issues of Puerto Rican identity and colonisation, his innovative oeuvre has expanded in terms of both medium and thematics; Sánchez now alludes to international subjects – including U.S. interventions abroad, apartheid, and nuclear disarmament – in addition to local and personal interests, through painting, photography, printmaking, and video.
Early in his career, Sánchez adopted salsa percussionist Ray Barretto’s term “Rican/Struction” to describe his own artistic approach, which utilises methods of deconstruction and reordering to challenge dominant cultural narratives while centering Puerto Rican perspectives. Sánchez’s works integrate family photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, Christian, African, and Tain iconography, his own bilingual writings, and appropriated texts.
Together, these elements encourage viewers to consider and celebrate the complexity of living between and within multiple ethnic, racial, and national identities.
Profoundly expressive, candid, and engaging, Sánchez’s work forms part of the tradition of socially-engaged art in the United States – inciting urgent conversations around social hybridity, political struggle, and ultimately, justice.
Sánchez’s work is held in prominent museum collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and El Museo del Barrio, all in New York City; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and The Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; El Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico; and El Centro Wilfredo Lam in Havana, Cuba.
A forthcoming survey exhibition of the artist is being organised by the Phillips Collection in Washington DC for 2027.
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