Ballroom Marfa will present Los Encuentros, a group exhibition opening July 4, 2025. The exhibition brings together five leading Latinx artists: Justin Favela, Ozzie Juarez, Antonio Lechuga, Narsiso Martinez, and Yvette Mayorga. The artists share an abiding interest in the elevation of materials from everyday life. Los Encuentros will feature work newly-commissioned by Ballroom Marfa.
The artists of Los Encuentros are dedicated to community collaboration and the representation of Latinx culture to confront the accessibility of art spaces, colonial art histories, the conditions of labor, and lived experience. Together, their works explore larger societal truths and complexities while responding to the experiences of the people and places they engage with and depict. Marfa’s proximity to Mexico and the borders—political, cultural, artistic—that intersect in a space like Ballroom Marfa provide a pivotal context for Los Encuentros.
The exhibition’s five artists work in converging visual languages, combining elements of painting, sculpture, and installation. This hybrid approach invites viewers to reconsider traditional artistic boundaries and engage with both historical and contemporary artistic practices. The artists’ welcoming and seductive materials create encounters that feel personal, inclusive, and resonant with their own experiences while also challenging art world paradigms and confronting issues of class, borders, and culture head on with humor, reverence and pathos.
Joining Ballroom as guest curator for this project is Texas-based Maggie Adler, whose experience spans more than 30 exhibitions, artist-centered books, and site-specific commissions. Her previous collaborations with artists such as Gabriel Dawe, Mark Dion, Jean Shin, and Sandy Rodriguez have focused on fostering welcome and engagement in arts institutions. “I am delighted to bring new artists to Ballroom and to work again with artists whose practice centers on allowing a broad range of community members to see themselves represented in art spaces,” says Adler. “It is a thrill to help facilitate new works coming to life in Marfa.”
“Ballroom Marfa is honored to collaborate with Justin, Ozzie, Antonio, Narsiso, and Yvette, all of whom are reshaping the forms, as well as the norms, of contemporary art,” said Holly Harrison, Ballroom Marfa Executive Director. “Their work blurs boundaries, elevates everyday materials, and centers narratives that have too often been sidelined. Maggie’s deep commitment to equity, her curatorial rigor, and her longstanding relationships with the artists provided inspirational leadership to the project. At Ballroom, we’re proud to present exhibitions that are both grounded and groundbreaking, and in Los Encuentros audiences will encounter work that asks us all to rethink not just what we see and who we see, but, more importantly, how we see others and ourselves.”
Image Gallery
Artist Profiles
Justin Favela (b. 1986) an artist based in Las Vegas, examines the commodification of Mexican and Guatemalan culture in his artwork. His sculptural installations render massive scenes and oddly-scaled objects from cut tissue paper—the same material used in the construction of piñatas. He has covered everything from the facade of a motel to a cardboard life-size model of Chevy Impala with the vibrant colors of the piñata, celebrating low riders in the context of pristine spaces traditionally devoted to perceived fancy materials and aesthetics.
Favela creates sculpture that questions the line between art and everyday life. “The piñata style has become my signature. It’s something that I fought for a long time, because I didn’t want to be labeled as a Chicano or Latino or Brown artist. Now I see it as a way to be visible and for me to use the medium of piñata to express myself in a different way. The installations are about these spaces that I have had to navigate where I have to be the representative of my culture. Not only is [my work] about identity and nostalgia, it’s also about me navigating through the art world and showcasing my identity and the complexities of that.”
His work is both intended to challenge paradigms of the art world and to break down the metaphorical walls of an art space, creating an opportunity for collaboration, encouragement, and welcoming.
For Ballroom, Favela is paying homage to art world heroes Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg, among others while translating their work in to his own vernacular visual language.
He has participated in exhibitions and been awarded artists residencies across the United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom. He has exhibited his work both internationally and across the US. His installations have been commissioned by museums including the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and El Museo del Barrio in New York. He is the recipient of the 2021 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. He holds a BFA in fine art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Ozzie Juarez (b. 1991, Compton, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses the realms of painting and sculpture to honor and revitalize ancient and recent cultural artifacts, languages, and histories. Inspired by the techniques, collaborations, ambitions, and ephemeral qualities of unsanctioned public art, Juarez incorporates excerpts of paintings he observes across the LA landscape into his own work. His ongoing interest in the construction of shared experiences and identities can be equally attributed to time spent as a scenic painter specializing in physical simulation at Disneyland. The omnipresence of American cartoon culture—with its roots in racial stereotypes and its exoticization of global cultures—weaves itself effortlessly into Juarez’s motifs.
Juarez has described himself as someone who “wear(s) multiple hats,” as a figure in an artist-run community Gallery at Tlaloc in south central LA, a curator, community advocate, and painter. Juarez has been a vocal advocate for emerging artists and has mentored those for whom there may be historical barriers to pursuing a career in the arts.
Juarez’ canvas will be Ballroom’s facade, which he will transform into a technicolor rendering of pop culture and street art aesthetics.
Juarez earned his BFA from the University of California Berkeley. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, England, Paris, Miami, and Mexico City and has been featured in publications including Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz magazine, Artillery Magazine, Purple Magazine, Yahoo News, LAist, BBC News and El Economista. Juarez is a pillar of the local arts community and in 2020 he founded TLALOC Studios, an artist-run community gallery and studio building in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles. TLALOC evolves with its members, providing a space that encourages and promotes the possibility of a sustainable life as an artist, or as Juarez says, “a lifestyle worth living.”
Antonio Lechuga (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Dallas, TX where he currently lives and works. His work defies simple characterization, as his approach is painterly though his materials are a collage of the mass-produced pictorial blankets one might expect to find at swap meets, flea markets, or from urban street vendors. Lechuga’s practice focuses on the intersection of art, design, architecture and social change. He uses a varied visual language of materials and processes to discuss and investigate his culture and existence; both his experiences as a Tejano living in the 21st century and his constant battle with the erasure of that history. The current political climate informs and guides his work, whether that is depicting laborers or store fronts from his Dallas neighborhoods or finding a symbolic manner of confronting gun violence. An innocent bystander, Lechuga himself was subject to gang violence in the form of a drive-by shooting, inspiring his examination of the fragility between life and death. Through his sewn blanket collages, Lechuga pieces together new narratives of a future for Mexican-American Texans, seeking comfort and notions of home while investigating the deep and turbulent past of our region. His series Fences addressed U.S. and Mexico border issues through human-scale lattice sculptures wrapped in cobijas, colorful patterned polyester blankets that are a staple in Latinx homes.
Of the choice of cobijas as medium, Lechuga says,“The choosing of the materials is quite natural really. I buy them at places that anyone could walk into. Part of the intention of using them is that I am using the same type of material that the general public would have access to. For me, like others from a Latinx background, cobijas were something that was a part of the house. It’s one of those things that made home identifiable. These pieces of material we offered to us out of care and love. To wrap someone with one of these was to say that they love you and want you to be protected. Though soft, they are strong, armor like pieces of material that we use to give others the protection that they need.”
For Ballroom, Lechuga will spend time deeply investigating Marfa and surrounding communities, coming to understand the history and contemporary politics of today, research that will inform the visual language of his new work for the show.
Lechuga attended Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles, CA. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally but most previously at many regional Dallas-Fort Worth institutions including 500X Gallery, the Geometric MADI Museum, Arts Fort Worth, Craighead Green Gallery, Ro2 Art Gallery, ArtRoom and Love Texas Art Gallery. He has had solo exhibitions in 2022 at Love Texas Art Gallery, Fort Worth, TX, in 2023 at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, Dallas, TX, early 2024 at Daisha Board Gallery, Dallas, TX and Various Small Fires – Dallas (2024). He currently has a solo exhibition titled Flowers for the Living – 2022 and the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX. Antonio’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and private collections across the U.S.
Narsiso Martinez (b. 1977, Oaxaca, Mexico) makes drawings and mixed media installations that include multi-figure compositions set amidst agricultural landscapes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez’s portraits of farmworkers are painted, drawn, and expressed in sculpture on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. In a style informed by 1930s-era Social Realism and heightened through use of found materials, Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the “American farmworker,” itself a compromised piece of language owing to the industry’s conspicuous use of undocumented workers.
For this exhibition, Martinez will be represented by new work that relates to food production in the region as well as a selection of loans from collections around the country.
Martinez came to the United States when he was 20 years old. He attended Evans Community Adult School and completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29. He earned an Associate of Arts degree in 2009 from Los Angeles City College. In the fall of 2012 Narsiso earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University Long Beach. In the spring of 2018, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach and was awarded the prestigious Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally. His work is in the collections of the MFA Houston, LACMA, Buffalo AKG Museum, Hammer Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, MOLAA, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Martinez was awarded the Frieze Impact Award in 2023. Martinez lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.
Yvette Mayorga (b. 1991, Moline, IL) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work links feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to tropes of Western art history, European colonization, and racialized oppression —they are reminiscent of Barbie dreamscapes as well as frosted cakes. Her use of pink is disarming while operating as a weapon. She fuses confectionary labor with found images to explore the meaning of belonging.
Mayorga is creating a new work of sculpture that takes rococo excess and contemporary consumer culture as its basis. She will also be represented by paintings in her signature consumerist critique style, as well as a frosted, Barbie pink car that is a repository of kitsch.
Mayorga holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mayorga’s first East Coast solo museum exhibition, Dreaming of You was presented at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum from September 15, 2023 to March 17, 2024. In 2023, Mayorga had her first major solo museum exhibition, What a Time to be at The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; El Museo del Barrio, The Center for Craft, Asheville, NC; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX; and LACMA, Los Angeles, CA. Mayorga’s large-scale installation, Pilgrimage to the Isle of Pink, is on view for the next 25 years for the City of Chicago’s permanent public art collection at O’Hare International Airport’s Terminal 5.
Her works are in the permanent collections of 21c Museum Hotels, Cerámica Suro, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, DePaul Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New Mexico State University Art Museum. Recent accolades include the Cerámica Suro Residency (2023), New Mexico Arts Artists Residency at New Mexico Art Museum (2022) and was awarded the Individual Artist Program Grant in Chicago, IL in 2022 among others. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Acknowledgements
Los Encuentros is curated by Maggie Adler, and organized by Holly Harrison, Ballroom Marfa Executive Director, with Felix Benton, Ballroom Marfa Assistant Curator. Ballroom Marfa extends special thanks for artist support courtesy of Sasha & Edward P. Bass, Entrada of Texas, Randa Jane Becker and Koen Van Den Heuvel, Libby and Brooks Hogg, and Jennifer and Anton Segerstrom.
Vinyl Brunch is generously supported by Raba Marfa and Vada Jewelry.
Opening Weekend Schedule
Friday, July 4 from 6—8PM
Opening Celebrations
Kick of Los Encuentros with drinks and community festivities.
Saturday, July 5 from 7—11 PM
Live Music at Capri: Los Juanos & Sultanes del Yonke
Two bands, one night! Enjoy back-to-back performances of vibrant cumbia and retro rock.
Sunday, July 6 from 11 AM—3 PM
Vinyl Brunch at Capri
An analog brunch experience with regionally sourced ingredients, vinyl, and really good cocktails.