Matthew Villarreal
Matthew Villarreal is an artist, community advocate, and educator from El Paso, TX with over 16 years of experience working with students of color and first-generation college students. Matthew is currently an Assistant Professor of Art, Design, and Social Justice and an Assistant Dean for Art and Design Education at Parsons School of Design. Before joining Parsons in 2019, Matthew worked as a high school teacher and college-access administrator in various Title I schools. His creative practice blends pedagogy, artmaking, and activism with the aim of building space for whole communities to deepen community confidence and creative capacity via workshops, exhibitions, and exchanges. Matthew is a current AICAD BIPOC Academic Leadership Institute Fellow, a 2022-23 AAM Museum Education Fellow, recently exhibited work during Fashion Week Brooklyn, Winter 2023, and has an upcoming show at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Gallery in New York City.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My visual work often uses tactile materials associated with both the body and the earth to explore the various liminal points in language, politics, and the psychology of voicelessness. Much of my work centers around desert motifs, often exaggerated or abstracted, as a proxy to challenge conceptions of otherness. Materials like clay, masa, cotton, or wax function as stand-ins for the body; representations of the desert (a landscape often viewed as barren, hostile, or undesirable... rarely understood as beautiful or teeming with life) is used as a signifier for the silenced. My interest in the overlay and exploitation of points where sign and signifier don’t match up, where suggestive dichotomies, borders, and boundaries are thwarted and where walls crumble, informs much of my work because these conflicts directly speak to the beautiful collisions I have observed living and working along the US-Mexico border.