Teddy Sandoval’s ‘Butch Gardens School of Art’
El Museo del Barrio presents Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, opening September 10, 2026, a major exhibition examining the life and work of Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), an innovative yet historically underrecognized artist whose practice explored gender, sexuality, identity, and belonging with humor and political urgency. Rooted in Los Angeles’s queer and Chicane artistic communities, Sandoval’s work engaged the social and cultural movements shaping the United States and Latin America from the 1970s through the 1990s.
“We are honored to be the only New York City venue for this important exhibition, which expands the art historical canon while celebrating the creativity and resilience of queer, Chicane, Latine, and Latin American artists,” Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director of El Museo del Barrio, said. “Presenting exhibitions like this reflects El Museo’s ongoing commitment to amplifying voices that have too often been overlooked and fostering dialogue across generations and communities.”
Curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, the exhibition takes its title from Butch Gardens, a gay bar in Los Angeles frequented by Sandoval and fellow Chicane patrons in the early 1970s. Sandoval adopted the bar’s name for the fictional “Butch Gardens School of Art,” a conceptual framework through which he fostered collaboration, experimentation, and creative community while challenging traditional art world structures.
“El Museo del Barrio is a fitting home for this exhibition as Teddy Sandoval’s work exists at the intersection of queer, Chicanx, and transnational artistic histories,” C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz said. “Bringing the exhibition to one of the nation’s leading museums dedicated to Latinx art and culture expands the conversation Sandoval began decades ago and underscores his enduring relevance for contemporary audiences.”
Expanding beyond a conventional retrospective, the exhibition places Sandoval’s work in dialogue with a multigenerational group of queer, Latine, and Latin American artists whose practices share related visual languages and political concerns. Spanning photography, painting, drawing, collage, conceptual art, and performance, the exhibition foregrounds interconnected histories of queer and diasporic artistic production across the Americas.
For El Museo del Barrio’s presentation, additional loans and artworks from the museum’s collection expand on the themes of self-fashioning and gender presentation in the exhibition. These additional artworks also draw the east and west coasts into closer conversation with material that examines queer spaces and queer art in New York City during the period that Teddy Sandoval was working in Los Angeles.
“Bringing Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art to El Museo del Barrio provides an important opportunity to continue the conversations we’ve been fostering around queer Latine art, history, and community,” Lee Sessions, El Museo’s Permanent Collections Associate Curator, said. “Teddy Sandoval’s work—and that of the many artists featured in this exhibition—speaks powerfully to queer desire, pleasure, and self-expression, reminding us that these histories and voices are not only vital to our understanding of the past, but also deeply necessary today.”
