Los Encuentros

Ballroom Marfa will present Los Encuentros, a group exhibition opening July 4, 2025. The exhibition brings together five leading Latinx artists: Justin Favela, Ozzie Juarez, Antonio Lechuga, Narsiso Martinez, and Yvette Mayorga. The artists share an abiding interest in the elevation of materials from everyday life. Los Encuentros will feature work newly-commissioned by Ballroom Marfa.

The artists of Los Encuentros are dedicated to community collaboration and the representation of Latinx culture to confront the accessibility of art spaces, colonial art histories, the conditions of labor, and lived experience. Together, their works explore larger societal truths and complexities while responding to the experiences of the people and places they engage with and depict. Marfa’s proximity to Mexico and the borders—political, cultural, artistic—that intersect in a space like Ballroom Marfa provide a pivotal context for Los Encuentros.

The exhibition’s five artists work in converging visual languages, combining elements of painting, sculpture, and installation. This hybrid approach invites viewers to reconsider traditional artistic boundaries and engage with both historical and contemporary artistic practices. The artists’ welcoming and seductive materials create encounters that feel personal, inclusive, and resonant with their own experiences while also challenging art world paradigms and confronting issues of class, borders, and culture head on with humor, reverence and pathos.

Joining Ballroom as guest curator for this project is Texas-based Maggie Adler, whose experience spans more than 30 exhibitions, artist-centered books, and site-specific commissions. Her previous collaborations with artists such as Gabriel Dawe, Mark Dion, Jean Shin, and Sandy Rodriguez have focused on fostering welcome and engagement in arts institutions. “I am delighted to bring new artists to Ballroom and to work again with artists whose practice centers on allowing a broad range of community members to see themselves represented in art spaces,” says Adler. “It is a thrill to help facilitate new works coming to life in Marfa.”

“Ballroom Marfa is honored to collaborate with Justin, Ozzie, Antonio, Narsiso, and Yvette, all of whom are reshaping the forms, as well as the norms, of contemporary art,” said Holly Harrison, Ballroom Marfa Executive Director. “Their work blurs boundaries, elevates everyday materials, and centers narratives that have too often been sidelined. Maggie's deep commitment to equity, her curatorial rigor, and her longstanding relationships with the artists provided inspirational leadership to the project. At Ballroom, we’re proud to present exhibitions that are both grounded and groundbreaking, and in Los Encuentros audiences will encounter work that asks us all to rethink not just what we see and who we see, but, more importantly, how we see others and ourselves."

Photo caption information
[1] Justin Favela, Gypsy Rose Piñata (II), 2022. Found objects, cardboard, Styrofoam, tissue paper, and glue, 60 x 210 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Airi Katsuta. [2] Ozzie Juarez, Zayayin, 2024. Acrylic, emulsion vinyl, airbrush, owl lock and barbed wire on oxidized metal gate, 98 x 75 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. Photo: © 2024 Yubo Dong. [3] Antonio Lechuga, St. Christopher, Patron Saint of travelers, guiding river crossers, 2024. Various cobijas (fleece blankets), 174 x 84 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist. [4] Narsiso Martinez, Then and Now, Hope and Dignity, 2024. Acrylic, gouache, charcoal, collage, simple leaf on found produce boxes, 76.5 x 68 x 15.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. Photo: © 2024 Yubo Dong. [5] Yvette Mayorga, Bien Chiqueada, 2024. Acrylic nails, nail charms, toy snake, false eyelashes, toy scorpion, scorpion belt, and acrylic piping on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist.