Photo credit: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago, In-progress Luis Sahagun
Craft and Community Vitality Grants
Informed by the artist’s own background and heritage of Curanderismo, an Indigenous philosophy of healing, Sahagun will facilitate two 4-hour workshops ending in a culminating collective ceremony for a cohort of Black, Indigenous, and artists of color (BIPOC) to engage in Mexican-Indigenous rituals and their contemporary applications via craft practices.
Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Luis is an artist and ritualist whose practice confronts the palpable inescapability of race and transforms art into an act of cultural and spiritual reclamation. He has exhibited widely at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Latchkey Gallery NYC, Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), and The National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), among others. He has held residencies at Roswell, NM; The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program (LAP), Saratoga, CA, the Chicago Artist Coalition; and was a Critical Race Studies Scholar at Michigan State University. His work has been examined in publications including Artillery Magazine, Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, Newcity, and the Chicago Tribune. His work is included in the Fidelity Collection of Boston, Alta Med Collection of Los Angeles, the Allex Ko Collection, and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, among many others. His practice has been spotlighted as having a unique voice helping to shape, shift, and touch the world on radio, podcasts, and television networks such as MundoFOX, NBC, UNIVISION and WBEZ-NPR. He received his undergraduate degree from Southern Illinois University- Carbondale, an MFA at Northern Illinois University. Luis is 3Arts awardee and a 2023 United States Artist Fellow.