STATEMENT
Multidisciplinary Site-Responsive Botanical Artist
My work is derived from years of hands-on labor with living materials. I’ve spent the majority of my life in floristry, gardening, and creating large-scale botanical production. It’s in these daily processes of cutting, bundling, watering, arranging, and repairing that I encountered the foundation of the fine art practice within a trade that contemporary art rarely acknowledges as such. The studio and the day job inform each other; they are the two arms of one body of work. The same skills, instincts, and forms of attention shape both.
My installations and art objects emerge from this lived experience and embodied knowledge of plants, soil, and the stewardship practices that shape them. Painting, sculpture, object-making, and lens-based documentation—including process and time-lapse photography—serve as parallel extensions of this investigation. Materially, I work with flora, substrate, roots, debris, and the structures that support them: canvas, oil, acrylics, plaster, wood, and steel. Many pieces are site-responsive and are primarily activated by the space they inhabit.
My South Texan Tejano heritage and engagement with Chicano frameworks like Rasquachismo and Curanderismo inform the ethics of this practice. The conceptual nature of the work arrives through repetition, tending, protection, presence, and a grounding shaped by daily contact with material. These traditions shape how I handle materials, organize space, and understand making as a way of meeting uncertainty.
Maintenance is the core methodology of my practice. While it inevitably intersects with questions of labor, value, and stereotype, it also provides the clearest framework for understanding the work. By treating botanical knowledge as my material and maintenance as my artistic methodology, maintenance shifts from an act of preservation to the essential process through which the artwork comes into being.
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 practices. 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 2025, 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