The Clothes that Make the Man
ON A JUNE EVENING IN 2018, ARTist Jose Villalobos stood quietly in an exhibit hall at the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, watching the crowd. His artwork, “De La Misma Piel / Of the Same Skin,” was making its regional debut as part of the Transborder Biennial, a binational exhibition also on display at Villalobos’ hometown El Paso Museum of Art. Villalobos, who is gay and makes work that challenges and reinvents symbols of macho norteño culture, could only guess how his work would be received by the northern Mexican crowd — and by his fronterizo family, if they chose to show up at all.
“De La Misma Piel” is a simple but affecting work: a line of leather belts, each emblazoned with an all-caps word where a family surname might typically be imprinted. These words are anti-gay slurs: maricón, jotito, mariposa. The work speaks to the homophobia implicit in macho men’s fashion, and to a painful sense of being “branded” that comes with gay life against this cultural backdrop.
Villalobos sees his work, which includes clothing-based sculpture and performance art, as pitched against a broader performance of gender and sexuality. “I would see my uncles wear the belts and the hats, and also my dad,”
