Nicolas V. Sanchez: belongings

In belongings, his 2022 solo exhibition at Sugarlift, the Mexican-American artist Nicolas V. Sanchez explored belonging as a familial, cultural, ancestral, historical and geographic experience. The title turns on a play on words: belonging to a family, a land or a culture is always bound up with being in longing for it, for connections that resist any single explanation.

Working from memory and imagination, Sanchez drew on scenes of family life, cultural figures and pastoral spaces, and on his upbringing in the Midwest as the child of Mexican immigrants. Monumental oil paintings of a dancer in a full, swirling skirt, a wall crowded with framed family photographs, and a flock of sheep running through a room hung alongside intimate drawings in charcoal and ballpoint pen, among them an open sketchbook shown in an acrylic vitrine.

Sugarlift's press release placed the work within a wider question of who belongs in the art canon. Institutions still underrepresent Latinx artists, and Sanchez answered with a personal narrative, celebrating cultural nuance and the universal desire to belong to one another.

The show opened on Cinco de Mayo, May 5, 2022, and Sugarlift celebrated with the artist over beer, festive music and traditional Mexican treats. Colossal featured the exhibition that month, and its run was extended to July 31. The exhibition was dedicated to the memory of Raúl Sanchez.