ABOUT
David is an Oaxacan indigenous artist living in the Midwest since 2017. David grew up in Oaxaca, Queretaro and Guanajuato in Mexico. For fifteen years, He has dedicated his artistic work to producing figurative sculpture, emphasizing experimentation with a wide variety of materials. Since 2014, his work has been enriched through pictorial interventions in public spaces and community art. His productions arise from constant reflections on identity, the implications of being human, and the process of migration. Working with a network of reinterpretations of symbolic elements from pre-Hispanic, Mexican cultures, and the indigenous communities of the Americas to offer the decolonial perspectives for both addressing and generating questions.
The themes that permeate His work are reflections around three conceptual axes that are intrinsically related: identity - both individual and collective - the human being and migration.
A recurring theme in his production is a reflection on identity, both the complexity of his own identities and the collective identities that link us to different socio-cultural groups and each other. David is a Mexican, a Chinanteco indigenous from Oaxaca, and the grandson of a textile artist from whom He learned to create beauty with his hands. David grew up in different regions of Mexico, exposed to a great variety of artistic and cultural expressions as similar as they were contrasting; is how He trained as a person and as an artist amid constant changes in places, cultures, and languages. His production reckons with his difference, intermediacy, and adaptation. It also reflects the identity of the multiple communities that he has been a part of and that is part of him.
Much of his artistic thought addresses what it means to be human through the representation of the human figure. The human figure allows him to express and raise questions about the interrelation between mind-body-spirit, the duality of life and death, the fragility of the body, and the connections between human and non-human beings. In acknowledging that cultures worldwide have asked these same questions, He links indigenous worldviews that aid us in understanding our humanity from a decolonized perspective—giving us new alternatives to understand ourselves as social beings interconnected with other living beings.
Although his work adopted artistic practices throughout Mexico that enriched and diversified his art-making through his constant migration within Mexico, migration has become a central axis of his work since He moved to the United States. In the US, He is part of the Latin American communities, which have historically been marginalized. In a matter of border crossing, his identity and that of his family as Mexican migrants became salient. This process has led him to question the narratives that perpetuate segregation, division, hierarchies, and understanding difference as dangerous instead of promoting unity, collaboration, equity, and appreciation of the differences. His questions have led him to observe that the processes of oppression experienced by indigenous groups in different countries are the same. His work calls us to equity: to appreciate Mexican and indigenous people, their cultural traditions, and the differences that enrich multicultural communities.
His production is primarily sculptural work and, more recently, public and community art. His aesthetic language is based on the human and zoomorphic figure that He seeks to articulate with the presence of symbolic and aesthetic elements that are part of pre-Hispanic worldviews and of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, many of which coincide.
The medium He uses is always subordinate to the form and context in which each work is produced; both are an intrinsic part of the work and guide his selection of materials. This way of understanding artistic production has allowed him to sculpt and model with a wide variety of materials, formats, dimensions, and details and explore interventions in public space with community art in the form of murals and workshops.
Community art is Art made for a community where the same community is an active part of the conceptualization and production of the work. The community art projects that He has developed recently have collaborated with members of the Mexican community from Nebraska. These works make visible and attribute value to this community's cultural features that have historically been ignored and rejected. The works open the possibility for community members to connect, develop a sense of belonging to the locality where they live, and become more forcefully involved in improving their living conditions, their neighborhood, and their city. The works make Mexican culture visible, exhorting society to appreciate the active contributions that this community makes to our city. The murals are works of public Art that portray people who live and give vitality and cohesion to the Mexican community in Lincoln. The murals are a reflection of this same vitality. The workshops allow the use of Art to open spaces that increase connections between community members to address issues of social justice.