On Thursday, September 10, El Museo del Barrio opened Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, an exhibition that brings a long-overlooked Los Angeles artist to Museum Mile. The show runs through January 10, 2027, at the museum’s home at 1230 Fifth Avenue, according to El Museo, and it opens just ahead of Hispanic Heritage Month, which begins September 15.
Who was Teddy Sandoval?
Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995) was, in the museum’s words, “an innovative yet historically underrecognized artist whose practice explored gender, sexuality, identity, and belonging with humor and political urgency.” He worked within Los Angeles’s queer and Chicano artistic communities for a quarter century. Independent Curators International, which organized the touring exhibition, describes him as an artist who “produced subversive, yet playful artworks that explored the codes of gender and sexuality,” often built around a signature faceless male figure.
The exhibition’s title borrows from Sandoval’s own wit. According to ICI, the Butch Gardens School of Art was a faux institution and artistic persona he named after Butch Gardens, a gay bar in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The show is presented as the first museum retrospective dedicated to the artist, with an emphasis on printmaking, drawing, mail art and xerography.
A survey built on conversation
Rather than isolating Sandoval, the curators, C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, place his work among a multigenerational group of queer, Latine and Latin American artists who share related visual languages and political concerns. El Museo lists a roster that includes Yolanda Andrade, Félix Ángel, Myrna Báez, Ester Hernández, Hudinilson Jr., Marisol, Marta Minujín, Joey Terrill, Martin Wong, Felipe Baeza and Ana Segovia, across photography, painting, drawing, collage, conceptual art and performance. ICI frames the approach as an alternative model for a survey, one that reveals “unanticipated affinities and parallel histories across the Americas.”
At El Museo, the presentation is overseen by Lee Sessions. The exhibition was produced by Independent Curators International in collaboration with the Vincent Price Art Museum and the Williams College Museum of Art, with support from funders including the Getty Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Mellon Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation, the museum notes.
The road to New York
New York is the latest stop on a tour that has taken the show across the country. ICI’s tour schedule lists:
- Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles: October 21, 2023 to March 2, 2024
- Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts: August 23 to December 22, 2024
- The Contemporary Austin, Texas: September 12, 2025 to January 11, 2026
- El Museo del Barrio, New York: September 10, 2026 to January 10, 2027
Around the exhibition
El Museo is extending the show into its evening programming. On Friday, September 18, El Museo After Dark: Disco and Desire will offer an after-hours celebration inspired by the Sandoval exhibition, combining Latino disco, dancing and late-night gallery access, as announced with the museum’s Hispanic Heritage Month programming.
For New York audiences, the timing is apt. El Museo del Barrio is presenting a Chicano artist from the West Coast whose humor and candor about queer life were long underrecognized, and doing so in dialogue with artists from across the hemisphere. It is a retrospective that corrects the record while inviting visitors to enjoy the joke.
See all sources
- Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, El Museo del Barrio, 2026-09-10
- Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, Independent Curators International, 2026-09-10
- El Museo del Barrio Announces Hispanic Heritage Month Programming, City Life Org, 2026-09-07
- El Museo After Dark | Disco and Desire, El Museo del Barrio, 2026-09-18
Lead image: illustrative photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash.
