Congratulations to HM&C Artist Juan Sánchez for his 1983 painting The Most Cultural Thing You Can Do entering the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Juan Sánchez is one of the most significant Nuyorican visual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Sánchez emerged as a central figure within a generation of artists using diverse media to explore ethnic, racial, and national identity as well as social justice in the 1980s and 90s. While Sánchez first gained recognition for his large multi-layered mixed-media collage paintings addressing Puerto Rican identity and U.S. colonialism, his innovative oeuvre has expanded in terms of both medium and thematics; Sánchez now alludes to international subjects—including U.S. interventions abroad, apartheid, and nuclear disarmament—in addition to local and personal interests, through painting, photography, printmaking, and video. The artist has consistently created art through lenses of personal experience and affinity, solidarity, and anti-colonialism.
Artwork: Juan Enrique Sánchez, The Most Cultural Thing You Can Do, 1983, oil, photo collage, and mixed media on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2025.33.1
