Oscar Gonzalez

Artist Statement: As a queer Mexican-American artist, my practice centers on printmaking and installation-based work that explores intersectional identity. Through imagery rooted in vaquero culture, botanical forms, ecology, and personal narrative, I investigate how histories are inherited, remembered, and erased. While I do not identify as a cowboy through contemporary ranch labor or agricultural practice, my relationship to the vaquero tradition is shaped by family histories connected to rural life, agricultural work, and working-class experiences. Drawing from family archives and historical research, I examine how cowboy identity can exist beyond occupation and function as a cultural inheritance. Through this lens, I seek to challenge dominant myths of the American West and reintroduce the foundational contributions of Mexican, Indigenous, Black, queer, and other cowboys of color whose histories have often been excluded from popular narratives.
My work primarily utilizes printmaking processes and works on paper. I am drawn to materials that carry cultural significance and historical connections to Mexican heritage, allowing the medium itself to reinforce the ideas embedded within the work. Working from photographs, observation, archival materials, and memory, I construct layered visual narratives that merge personal and collective histories. These processes allow me to navigate the space between past and present, tradition and contemporary experience, while exploring the figure of the vaquero not only as a laborer, but also as a symbol of cultural continuity, resilience, and identity.
At first encounter, I aim for viewers to recognize an apparent fascination with cowboy culture; however, upon closer inspection, I want them to navigate imagery that complicates and subverts familiar Western archetypes. My work asks viewers to confront assumptions about who
belongs within the history of the American West and to consider how race, sexuality, and power have shaped its representation. By centering queer and BIPOC cowboy experiences, I seek to create space for narratives that have been historically marginalized while encouraging reflection on the ongoing effects of cultural erasure. Ultimately, my work is an act of reclamation—one that affirms the presence, agency, and enduring legacy of those whose contributions to cowboy culture have too often been overlooked.