Through his deftly crafted works, the Mexican American multimedia artist and performer Raúl de Nieves is brightening up our world.
Raúl de Nieves
Photographer Christopher Currence
“I’m so interested in just honing down to the vulnerability of the self,” Raúl de Nieves says as the sorbet hues of dusk flood his spacious Brooklyn studio in late December. “I want to honor the labor of love that may be forgotten. I think the way we’re living now, where everything is so fabricated, there is a loss of humanity, in a sense.” The 41-year-old artist was preparing for his first solo show in Mexico City, Entre las manos de tiempo, at Morán Morán, a gallery he recently joined. On the floor around him were 34 pairs of traditional work gloves arranged like a mandala. He was adorning each piece with colorful beads, vintage fabric, and glittering sequins procured from the overflowing bins of bric-a-brac in his Willy Wonka-like workspace. De Nieves was excited about Entre because it represented a return to his roots.
“I don’t want to feel like a foreigner in the place where I was born,” says de Nieves, who was raised in Morelia, a small city in central Mexico. “But I think that as we get older, we try to go back to where we come from, so it’s almost like the perfect circle.”
Part of what drives the artist’s practice is his tireless curiosity about connection and transformation in both the physical and spiritual realms. He uses humble, everyday materials like plastic beads, gaffer tape, paper, cardboard, gels, upholstery foam, needles, pins, and glue to create artworks that mutate into precious but also tactile pieces. His elaborately beaded costumes are not relegated to the four walls of a gallery or museum but rather they are meant to be worn (and have been at many a nightclub). “I like to put things together that maybe are not supposed to be there,” he says, noting that he would love for art in general to be more accessible. “Everyone thinks that the work is so fragile, but it’s so resilient.”
Raúl de Nieves. Installation view: A window to the see, a spirit star chiming in the wind of wonder…, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2023-2024.
Courtesy the artist and Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2023. Photograph by Jonathan Vanderweit
At one of his current shows, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, guests are invited to sit next to and “gently touch” the genderless beaded figures that are sitting in the East Lobby. While doing so they can look up at a chandelier depicting a human figure within a cocoon, or bask in the ever-changing chromatic light of a 27-panel faux-stained-glass window. At the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, de Nieves created “stained glass” panels that cover the space’s three grandiose skylights and cast a kaleidoscopic glow over the cavernous space. De Nieves first became known for this style of handmade stained glass when he was part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. “The story of the stained glass is the acceptance of not just the body but the surroundings it houses,” he said at the time, noting that however the light strikes will make for a natural performance.
De Nieves admits that the manual aspect of his practice can be tedious— it often takes him years to complete a work—but he says this kind of meditative-like repetition in shaping, adding, sculpting, and layering is quite liberating. For the shows at the Henry and the Baltimore Museum, de Nieves enlisted two assistants to help him complete the large-scale pieces; typically, though, he is doing it on his own. “I have to remind myself that this is how I make things, and how I will continue to make them,” he says. “But I’m also seeking different forms of creating, you know?”
He learned how to craft as a child from his family and local artists in Morelia. His inspiration is more wide ranging— Catholicism, club culture, traditional European art, and punk music. His baroque constructions are part chiaroscuro and part glitter bomb, but the themes they address are universal: Life and death, happiness and sadness, struggle, and celebration.
Raúl de Nieves. Celebration (mother) (detail), 2009-2022. Mixed media on pedestal. Courtesy the artist and Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2023. Photograph by Jonathan Vanderweit
When he was nine, de Nieves emigrated to San Diego, California, with his mom and two siblings. (His father died when he was two, another reason he finds himself examining existential themes.) After being exposed to the vibrancy of his hometown, de Nieves felt alienated in the States. He focused on his crafts, became an ardent fan of The Smashing Pumpkins, and like most angsty teenagers, eventually found his tribe through music and the punk scene.
When it came time for college, de Nieves was accepted into California College of the Arts (CCA) but passed on the opportunity because he didn’t want to pay the lofty tuition. “I thought I could find my own mentors and also learn to be a mentor to myself,” he says.
Instead, he moved to San Francisco, where he found like- minded creatives and started working on a series of 50 paintings dedicated to the Roman soldier Saint George slaying a dragon. He also became known for wearing outré outfits around town. His signature accessory was a pair of duct-taped platform heels that he would wear at gallery openings or while writhing around on the floor and smashing glass at punk bars as part of a two-person act called Carnage Composition.
Raúl de Nieves. Untucked Parrotineal Pull Through the House Down Boots, OKKUURD!!!, 2023. Fiberglass, epoxy foam, cement, resin, glue, and beads. Installation view: Raúl de Nieves: and imagine you are here, Baltimore Museum of Art, 2023. Photograph by Mitro Hood.
Raúl de Nieves. in reality, a glimpse of infinity, in the palm of space, our roots incandescent, horses made of paper (detail), 2023. Installation view: A window to the see, a spirit star chiming in the wind of wonder…, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2023-2024. Courtesy the artist and Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2023. Photograph by Jonathan Vanderweit
In 2006, de Nieves moved to New York, not sure what it would hold for him. One day a curator came by to check out his work and was drawn to a “sculpture” that happened to be those dilapidated shoes. Soon de Nieves was staging his first show in the city, at Newman Popiashvili, a now- defunct Chelsea gallery. “My work can be seen in so many different perspectives,” he says. “But I think the labor is what gives people this desire to get to know it better—it’s the colors and richness and the texture.”
Performance and music still play a major influence in his practice. During his early years in New York, de Nieves was somewhat famous on the Bushwick drag scene, where he would dress very much like his glittery sculptures. Fittingly, his studio was in the basement of a queer nightlife venue in Queens where people would pop by at all hours. In 2014, de Nieves—having studied composition under the American composer Robert Ashley—and the interdisciplinary artist Colin Self staged an hour-long opera replete with a full chorus and string ensemble at a former Brooklyn bank. The work was based on the tarot card The Fool, which came to de Nieves in a dream. For the past decade, de Nieves has been the frontman of the “obliquely political” band Hairbone—a duo that has performed at The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, and the Met.
De Nieves’s kitschy mystique has piqued the interest of the fashion industry. Around 2013, his Tumblr page (RIP) caught the eye of visionary creatives like the stylist Panos Yiapanis and photographer Mario Sorrenti, who called in certain pieces— including amorphous bedazzled shoes that looked like giant crystal geodes—for a shoot on rave culture for W magazine. Soon Karl Lagerfeld followed up with a spread styled by Carine Roitfeld for Harper’s Bazaar.
Raúl de Nieves. Installation view: A window to the see, a spirit star chiming in the wind of wonder…, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2023-2024. Courtesy the artist and Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2023. Photograph by Jonathan Vanderweit
Then the big-name brands came calling: Bulgari (a life-sized carousel with glittering magical creatures, his first public art piece, displayed during Art Basel in 2018 in conjunction with the Art Production Fund); Hermès (the windows for its flagship store in Milan during Salone del Mobile and also for its shop in Hawaii); and Supreme (a chainstitch denim collection that sold out immediately).
While certain art world types advised de Nieves against selling out with such commercial projects, he relied on his instincts to guide him. “I never thought I would be having conversations with Hermès,” he says. “They are inviting outsiders [like me] into their world, someone who still can’t even access it.”
Even though he might find the industry outwardly intimidating, de Nieves, who is wearing a beautiful pair of pearl drop earrings at the time of our interview and once deigned to go to school for fashion, admits that he wouldn’t mind starting a line of fine jewelry someday. “I’ve been slowly designing some cast-offs,” he says somewhat sheepishly.
As he continues to add to his artistic canon, de Nieves is acutely aware of the durational aspect of his work and of life in general. “I am extremely grateful and proud of the accomplishments I’ve been able to achieve,” he says. “But sometimes I look back and I’m like, ‘Who is he?’ Time is going by so fast.”
Raúl de Nieves. Frogmordial Genitals, A Sissy to Behold, RIBBIT!, 2023. Fiberglass, epoxy foam, cement, resin, glue, and beads. Installation view: Raúl de Nieves: and imagine you are here, Baltimore Museum of Art, 2023. Photograph by Mitro Hood
Text SARAH CRISTOBAL
Instagram: @norauls
