VIDEO
Ancient Futures with Joel Gaitan
Joel Gaitan ’s work explores self-identity, sexuality, and ancestral lineage. From forgotten...
Joel Gaitan
From the collection of Joel Gaitan’s Antojitos Box
Artist 003 Season Six. While celebrating life, death, and the afterlife, Joel Gaitan’s work studies matters of self-identity, sexuality, and ancestral lineage.
From forgotten tongues to erased cultures, he explores traditional hand-building clay techniques, keeping a sacred tradition from Nicaragua and Central America alive in a colonized world.
Joel Gaitan (b. 1995, Hialeah, Fla.) is a Nicaraguan-American artist whose work explores identity, spirituality and the stories carried through ancestry. He uses hand-built clay techniques passed down through generations, combining them with the symbols, gestures and imagery that shaped his upbringing.
Gaitan creates sculptures that blend humor, devotion and everyday life, often moving between the earthly and the supernatural. He also works across installation and mixed media, building pieces that feel both personal and universal. His figures honor the people and traditions that came before him, while imagining new worlds rooted in memory, ritual and ancestral storytelling. Gaitan lives and works between Miami and New York.
Learn more about Joel’s practice on his website here.
Filmed by Jorge Gonzalez Graupera
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