Juan Sánchez

Juan Sánchez was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 26, 1954. Sánchez’s parents were born in Puerto Rico–his mother, Carmen Maria Colón, in Maunabo in 1919 and his father, Juan Enrique Sánchez, Sr., in Ponce in the 1920s. After growing up on the predominantly-black southern coast of the island, they migrated to and met in New York in the early 1950s.

The artist’s family lived in various tenement buildings across Brooklyn, allowing Sánchez to experience working-class neighborhoods as they transitioned over the years from historically Jewish and Italian-American communities to predominantly Black and Puerto Rican areas. Sánchez remembers streets filled with music, vibrantly lined with grocery stores, barbershops, record stores, and bodegas. Sánchez was raised Catholic, attending church every Sunday with his brothers. Language was central to Sánchez’s upbringing: the artist spoke Spanish at home and learned English at school.

At Cooper Union, Sánchez studied with many accomplished artists in painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, including Hans Haacke, Reuben Kadish, Charles Side, and Eugene Tolchin. The coursework transformed his relationship to art, so much so that, in the artist’s words, he “defected” from the commercial art track to pursue fine arts.

In the 1970s, while Sánchez was studying at Cooper Union, students across the City University of New York (CUNY) system demanded departments for Black and Puerto Rican studies. Armed with his Yashica camera, Sánchez traveled across the five boroughs to photograph student demonstrations, protests, and parades. At the same time, the Young Lords Party, a grassroots civil and human rights organization based in Chicago, expanded into New York City, and issued free copies of their bilingual newspaper Palante. For Sánchez, these newspapers were the first time he was able to read and learn more about the history of Puerto Rico, the island’s indigenous people, the importation of slavery, the fight against Spain, and eventual invasion of the United States. Sánchez was also a regular at the Nuyorican Poets Café, attending poetry readings and live music performances almost weekly, featuring Nuyorican, African-American, Native American, and Asian-American artists like Amiri Baraka, Jean Chang, Sandra María Esteves, Louis Reyes Rivera, Miguel Algarín, Pedro Pietri, and Juan Hernández Cruz. These experiences had a profound effect on Sánchez’s life and career, transforming the way he thought about, experienced, and created art, and his understanding of the multi-cultural Afro-Jíbaro-Taíno people of Puerto Rico. Little did he know that many years later, in 1994, Sánchez’s work would be featured in a solo exhibition at Nuyorican Poets Café, entitled Juan Sánchez: Rican/Structions: Paintings.

Just a few months after receiving his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Sánchez’s graduate work went on to be featured in major museum exhibitions at the Bronx Museum, the New Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A number of these opportunities came through recommendations from his professors and mentors, namely, Leon Golub and Melvin Edwards. At the time, Sánchez was still living at home with his mother and storing his works in the building hallway. His work was, and continues to be, rooted at the intersection of the personal and political, often bringing attention to the Puerto Rican independence movement and calling for the release of political prisoners and nationalist activists.

While leading tours and developing family workshops in the education department at the Queens Museum, Sánchez suggested that the workshops expand beyond the visual arts to include music, dance, and theater. The Museum decided to hire a performing arts specialist to help improve the department’s syllabus and curriculum. When interviewing candidates, Sánchez met his future wife, Alma VIllegas, a graduate student at NYU in theater education. They married on March 13, 1987 and gave birth to their daughter, Liora Sánchez-Villegas on September 2, 1990, just days before Sánchez started teaching at Hunter College.

The artist’s mother, wife, and daughter became central figures in his work. Para Carmen María Colón is one of many examples. The mixed media print combining lithography, handcoloring, and chine college is an homage to his mother. At the top center, Sánchez pasted a self-portrait drawing by his mother of her standing next to the Puerto Rican Flamboyán Tree, flanked by a photograph of his mother looking out at their backyard and a photograph of a shelf in a botanica shop for spiritual and religious healing, with a black rag doll similar to the ones his mother made.