This Artist Defies The Ordinary By Taking His Sculptures To The Streets

Chicago-based artist, Juan Angel Chavez, is anything but conventional. Whether he’s deconstructing traffic cones or creating art that also functions as a mini skate park, his large-scale, bold sculptures push the boundaries of what art is.

“At times, I look at it from the perspective that it’s not necessarily art,” he says of his work. “It’s more like an experience, or like several experiences.”

Chavez notes that his pieces aren’t the kind of bland museum works that one needs to have an art degree to appreciate. Instead, his creations are vibrant, bursting forth from their environments to turn the familiar and mundane into the adventurous and innovative.

“That carries through from the years of doing speed installations or street art,” the artist explains. “It was really about accessibility and engagement and resonating more with a different sort of audience.”

Chavez looks for active participation from his viewers rather than passive appreciation. His goal is for the city, the people, and his work to all interact and play off of each other.

“You look at works and you say, ‘Oh, it is a sculpture.’ But it doesn’t function like a sculpture” he says. “It functions more like a park or it functions like a stage, or sometimes it has multiple facets of interaction with it. And for me, that’s really an important element of the work. It makes it more accessible and makes it less and less firm. It creates an intimate relationship with the object.”

For Chavez, life and art are interchangeable words for adventure. Whether he’s exploring a city, a new type of sculpture, or a different way of looking at the world, he keeps life fresh with an intense spirit of curiosity that defies the boring and ordinary. As he squeezes the most out of life, his work is a constant reflection of his passion for living in the moment. He has the tendency to upend the art world by changing materials and approaches to constantly to follow his inspiration. While other artists may become bored with routine or fall into the trap of creating the same thing again and again in order to sell pieces and please conventional galleries, Chavez fights against this blandification by allowing his intuition to guide him.

He battles, he says, against permanence.

“I feel like every time I finish a project I want to do something completely different just to entertain myself,” he says. “Which has been difficult in terms of working with galleries. Because they want me to do the same thing all the time. And I’m like, ‘I’m not into that.”

The Mexican-born artist, who moved to the United States with his family at 13, is known for his installations and sculpture made from found materials and objects gathered from abandoned buildings, alleys, and thrift stores. His creative authority in using found objects in innovative ways comes from his heritage, he says. The way he looks at materials, and his process of defying expectations with repurposed items is inspired by a childhood spent in Mexico.

“As a Mexican artist, I think I’m very influenced by situations where people adapt out of necessity,” Chavez notes. “Objects have multiple uses beyond the familiar, and those uses alter the personality of who you are. In Mexico, you see someone kick out the frame of a car and build a wagon out of it. This regression, is almost an apocalyptic regression of use in materials, and at the same time there’s something really poetically beautiful about it.”

One thing that makes Chavez so unique as an artist is how he takes his Mexican identity and heritage and seamlessly blends that into his modern day experience. He lives in the moment, and so his work is reflective, not just of his past as a child, but of the living, breathing city around him. He’s inspired by the city of Chicago, and his art pulls in his favorite aspects of the city, like skateboarding, to create something edgy and new. When he first moved to the States, he felt isolated and different. But it was skateboarding that taught him to love his adopted home. And the sport still inspires his work.

“Skateboarding made me realize that the city was a little different,” Chavez says. “That I have the space, even if it wasn’t a metaphysical space, but a mental space to see the city in a different way. That shaped my work in a lot of ways. It gave me that sort of exploration or a tier of exploration that I’ll always have and needed to have in Chicago.”

His love for finding the counterculture and hidden, abandoned spaces of the city inspires much of the artist’s work — which he considers more like three dimensional collages. “It really lead to pushing the boundaries of sculptural work within that realm,” he says. “And that’s really how I got started.”

Not that it was always easy for Chavez to follow his pure inspiration, and avoid the trap of doing work that felt like it wasn’t completely, authentically his. For many years, he did public, community work in the inner city. It was an education of sorts in street art, he says, and he considers that time period incredibly important and formative. But, at the same time, he quickly grew frustrated with following others’ ideas and not being able to be authentically himself.

“I was so overwhelmed with the idea of making work that wasn’t really mine,” Chavez says, “it seemed like I was almost making patronizing work.” Chavez soon began branching out on his own, creating sculpture that he was inspired to create in spaces that challenged the idea of where art could and should be.

He started by creating works that had never been done before, in untraditional spaces, using materials that were innovative and repurposed. It was a challenge that — though it involved planning — was dependent on an ability to be free and flexible, allowing his expectations and work to shift based on the space, materials, and the moment.

“What I usually do is after these structures function conceptually how I want them to, I allow myself the space with the creation of the work to have that freedom,” he says. “You’re exploring intent, and then letting the work flow naturally without any sort of premeditated thought of exactly what it’s going to be. That allows there to be more freshness in the work.”

It’s this freshness, this authenticity that draws crowds to Chavez’s pieces, and led not only to acclaim and attention as an artist, but to his current position teaching sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Authenticity and spontaneity isn’t an easy thing to teach though. It’s difficult to get students to turn off their rational sides, and let their instincts take over, to let fundamentals blend into true creativity.

“That’s the hardest thing to get across,” Chavez says. “On one hand, you’re teaching students how to manipulate and how to design, and how to think of work in a way that is more successful. And on the other, you try to strip them of everything that they perceive as ‘good’ by asking them to maintain something that is true to themselves, and finding that balance.”

A large part of what he tries to impart to the next generation of artists and innovators involves throwing away the idea of trying to impress others like teachers, critics, and fans, and being true to to what drives and inspires them.

“I tell them not to worry too much about trying to appear, or trying to sound intellectual,” Chavez says. “The work itself, and their interests, are critical ideological points of view. Focus on what works within the work. Not necessarily trying to impress their professors, or impress academia with the work.”

Living your passion means honesty to Chavez, and it’s incredibly important that this is a legacy he leaves to his students. When they drop pretense and the need to do what others expect, something very honest comes out of them, he says, and that honesty is what needs to be fostered.

It can be difficult to do this, of course — to live in the moment, and simply allow the work to be what it is. There’s always the concern that a piece won’t be taken in the right way, or seen in the way the artist intended. Or that anyone will be into it at all. But for Chavez, it’s easy to press through that self-doubt by simply staying authentic to his own vision in an unapologetic way. He just doesn’t let others’ expectations or opinions bother him.

“I don’t really care,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t really care whether someone really likes it or not or I’m offensive as long as it’s fun to make it.

So what’s next for the artist, who lives on the edge of unpredictable? Lately, he’s allowed his interests to shift him into simplicity, and he’s looking forward to changing the game once again by doing smaller installations and pieces. He wants his pieces to feel organic.

“I’m interested in projects that revolve around situations,” he says. “I’m inspired by nature most of the time. I’m inspired by situations within certain settings that are peculiar.”

“And I’ve been thinking not so much of larger scale work, but of going back to this moment in time in my career where I really enjoyed making things that didn’t have so many bells and whistles. But they were really very natural and even flowing.”

Once the unconventional becomes the conventional, Chavez shifts his focus to find new passion, new life, and new ways of creating.

“I have followed three words in my life,” he says. “It’s more like a model that drives my work. And those are muscle, guts, and luck. Muscle is working with my hands and doing the work that’s physically made and not prefabricated. That’s got the human touch to it, and is very personal. Guts is always working on the edge. Work that is not so much conceived but felt, that follows your intuition. And luck is everything that happens for the universe to provide. Those three things are really important to me.”