STATEMENT
Multidisciplinary Site-Specific Botanical Artist
My work grows out of years of hands-on labor with living materials. I came up in floristry, gardening, and large-scale botanical production, and these daily procedures of cutting, bundling, watering, arranging, and repairing have become the foundation of my art practice. I don’t separate the studio from the day job; the same skills, instincts, and forms of attention shape both. My installations and objects come from this lived experience with plants, soil, and the systems that keep them alive.
I work with flora, soil, roots, debris, and the structures that support them: canvas, plaster, wood, and steel. Many pieces are site-specific and built to shift over time. They respond to the conditions of the place they inhabit. Maintenance remains visible, and the work stays open to its own transformation.
My cultural background is central to the practice. I draw from Tejano heritage and Chicano art frameworks. Ideas of tending, protection, presence, and grounding shape how I handle material and organize space. These influences guide both form and the internal logic of the work.
I don’t approach conceptual work through detachment. I arrive at it through repetition, tending, and daily contact with material. The conceptual lives inside the physical: in gesture, in material choice, in maintenance, and in the shifting states of living systems.
My recent book, Undefined Naturally, gathers this lived knowledge across memoir, technique, and teaching. It forms the basis for a workshop-based pedagogy I am developing in the next phase of the practice.
Documentation, especially process and time-lapse, functions as a parallel tool. It allows me to study the layered process of making, the rhythm, and how a piece forms itself through repetition, labor, and inherited knowledge.
At its core, the work makes space for process, memory, and cultural continuity, as well as acts of experience that are often edited out. I want viewers and participants to slow down, look closely, and notice how labor, care, and environment shape what we build and how we live.
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