Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art

El Museo del Barrio presents Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, a major exhibition examining the life and work of Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), an innovative yet historically underrecognized artist whose practice explored gender, sexuality, identity, and belonging with humor and political urgency. Rooted in Los Angeles’s queer and Chicane artistic communities, Sandoval’s work engaged the social and cultural movements shaping the United States and Latin America from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, the exhibition takes its title from Butch Gardens, a gay bar in Los Angeles frequented by Sandoval and fellow Chicane patrons in the early 1970s. Sandoval adopted the bar’s name for the fictional “Butch Gardens School of Art,” a conceptual framework through which he fostered collaboration, experimentation, and creative community while challenging traditional art world structures.

Expanding beyond a conventional retrospective, the exhibition places Sandoval’s work in dialogue with a multigenerational group of queer, Latine, and Latin American artists whose practices share related visual languages and political concerns. Spanning photography, painting, drawing, collage, conceptual art, and performance, the exhibition foregrounds interconnected histories of queer and diasporic artistic production across the Americas.

The exhibition features artworks from across Teddy Sandoval’s career, alongside those by Yolanda Andrade, Félix Ángel, Myrna Báez, Ester Hernández, Hudinilson Jr., Marisol, Marta Minujín, Joey Terrill, Martin Wong, Felipe Baeza, Ana Segovia, and others.

El Museo del Barrio is the only New York City venue to host the traveling retrospective, organized by Independent Curators International (ICI) and developed in partnership with Williams College Museum of Art and Vincent Price Art Museum. El Museo’s presentation is overseen by Lee Sessions, El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collections Associate Curator.