STATEMENT
Multidisciplinary Site-Specific Botanical Artist
My work grows out of years of hands-on labor with living materials. I came up in floristry, gardening, and large-scale botanical production, and these daily procedures of cutting, bundling, watering, arranging, repairing have become the foundation of my art practice. I don’t separate the studio from the day job; the same skills, instincts, and forms of attention shape both. My installations and objects come directly from this lived experience with plants, soil, and the systems that keep them alive.
I work with materials that hold memory: flora, earth, roots, debris, and the structures that support them like canvas, plaster, wood and steel. Many of my pieces are site-specific and built to shift over time. They respond to the place they inhabit and the conditions around them. Maintenance becomes a living visible part of the application, and the work remains alive to its own transformation.
My cultural background is just as central to the practice. I draw from Tejano heritage, Chicano art theory, and Curanderismo as the roots to method. Ideas of tending, protection, presence, and grounding shape how I handle material and organize space. These influences guide both form and the internal logic of the work.
Rather than approaching conceptual art through reduction or detachment, I move toward it through devotion; through repetition, the tending, and the intimacy of daily practice. Conceptualism for me lives inside the physical work: in the mark and gesture, the choice and use of material, in the maintenance, and the shifting states of the living systems.
My recent book, Undefined Naturally, brings this lived knowledge together. It blends memoir, technique, and teaching, offering a framework for presence and material awareness that expands beyond the studio. This publication also grounds the workshop-based pedagogy I am developing for the next phase of my practice.
Documentation, especially process and time-lapse, functions as a parallel tool. It allows me to study the layered process of the making, the rhythm, and how a piece forms itself through repetition, labor, and inherited knowledge.
At its core, my work is about making space: for process, memory, cultural continuity, and the quieter parts of experience that are usually edited out. I want viewers and participants to slow down, look closely, and feel how labor, care, and environment shape the things we build and the lives we lead.
BIO
Juan M. Villanueva is a New York–based multidisciplinary site-specific botanical artist whose work grows from more than three decades of hands-on experience across floral design, gardening, sculpture, and installation. A second-generation florist raised in a family of ranchers, makers, and craftspeople from South Texas, he works within a lineage where tending, building, and working with the land were daily practice. These early forms of labor, repetitive, skilled, and often overlooked, continue to shape the logic and rhythm of his artistic process.
Working with living and durable materials such as flowers, soil, canvas, and steel, Villanueva develops installations and objects that examine how environments hold memory and how maintenance, presence, and care become creative forces. His practice draws from inter-generational knowledge systems, including gardening traditions, floral craft, and the cultural frameworks he grew up with, integrating them into contemporary forms of sculpture, site-responsive work, and pedagogical projects.
Over the span of his career, he built and led Villanueva Designs, where he developed the technical fluency and material intelligence that now inform his fine-art practice. His work has been shown at the SVA Flatiron Gallery, Chashama, La MaMa Gallery, in public commissions at Lincoln Center, and across community and nontraditional spaces.
In 2024, he released Undefined Naturally, a work that blends memoir, method, and pedagogy, documenting how lived conditions, labor, and the act of tending have shaped his approach to both making and teaching. He continues to teach nationally and internationally.
Juan M. Villanueva lives and works in Manhattan, where he is developing new site-sensitive installations and workshop models that focus on presence, material dialogue, and the creative clarity that emerges through daily acts of care.
IMDb
EMAIL
info@villanuevadesigns.com