San Antonio-rooted visual artist Jalen Colton Sanchez’s solo exhibition at Thrd Space Studio, “Perspectives of Otherness,” opens like a portal.
Vibrant sculptures stand as if excavated from a civilization built on Indigenous folk cosmologies. Around them, collages with radial patterns and chromatic bursts evoke a mestizo psychedelia that collapses myth and imagination into a single vibrating field.
Together, the pieces conceive mestizo identity as both ancestral and insistently contemporary.
Sanchez’s work is rooted in multicultural identity and the liminal space of nepantla, the Nahuatl term for in-betweenness. “Perspectives of Otherness,” his first solo exhibition in San Antonio, opened June 13 at Thrd Space Studio inside the 1906 South Flores Arts Incubator. The show draws from Indigenous, African and Mexican-American folk art traditions to “reclaim, recontextualize and honor” aesthetic linages excluded from the Western canon.
Sanchez was born and raised in San Antonio and is currently pursuing his BFA at the University of North Texas in Denton. Early on, the artist has built a practice that acknowledges his own heritage and cultural hybridity.
“This is a result of my research, my attempt to educate myself on hidden history,” Sanchez said. “Mestizaje, mixed Hispanic heritage, is a perspective that is often overlooked in the Western art world.”
The walls of Thrd Space are lined with Sanchez’s collages, improvisational works that map the psychic terrain of gender and racial identity. He describes the patchwork process as “intuitive” and “free-flowing” to mirror the unstable nature of the themes he explores.
In Floral Ascension (2025), he examines the cultural expectation of marianismo, which depicts a central feminine figure as “the foundational pillar” that enables her male counterpart to rise. The piece draws from what Sanchez calls “the spirituality of the feminine within Hispanic culture,” and uses layered paper and acrylic to visualize the cultural tension between reverence and burden.
Other collages turn their attention to masculinity.
Jaguar Dreamer: Memory of the Hunt (2026) depicts a hunter caught between survival and remorse to explore the “emotional weight carried by the hunter,” or the contradictions embedded in machismo. Sun Dreamer (2025) similarly challenges the masculine subject to engage in introspection. A contemplative male figure is fixed at the center of a radiant, sunflower-studded composition.
These two works complicate Latine gender norms by exploring their emotional nuance rendered in vibrant, symbolic tapestries.
Although the collages may feel improvisational, Sanchez says the sculptures are their architectural counterpoint — “methodical and planned out.” Built around symmetry, the sculpted works capture the iconography of ancient Aztec and Mayan stonework.
Of Eyes Unblinking and Weeping (2025) layers solemn faces into a façade of restrained grief. The faces meditate on emotional containment within patriarchal cultures and “honors unspoken sorrow as both a burden and a form of resilience.”
The monumental Mystery of Lineage (2025) anchors the exhibition. The sculpture uses paper clay, plaster and acrylic to create an earthy, timeworn surface that evokes a pre-Columbian artefact dug up from the jungle.
Sanchez describes the work as an exploration of ancestral memory, while its scale — 56 by 62 inches — gives it the presence of a ceremonial object. It’s the clearest articulation of the exhibit’s central proposition: that mestizo identity should be thought of as a continuous, evolving lineage rather than a fragmented inheritance.
The Thrd Space Studio gallery is a collaboration between artists Hannah Niño Harris, DezaRey Perez and Nancy Casanova. The space focuses on contemporary craft and material-driven practice with an emphasis on emerging local artists.
Niño Harris said the trio selects artists by asking not only whether their work is strong but its message is something worth broadcasting to Southtown’s long-standing creative community. With its emphasis on heritage and cultural reclamation, Sanchez’s work aligns closely with Thrd Space’s mission, she added.
“When I’m selecting an artist, and I present it to the group, I ask: ‘What do you think about their work? What do you think about what they’re saying? Does that represent us?’” Niño Harris said.
Thrd Space timed the exhibition opening to align with Southtown’s Second Saturday Art Walk, an event that’s in the process of rebounding to pre-pandemic levels. Today, 1906 South Flores Arts Incubator welcomes roughly 700 visitors on a typical Second Saturday.
In a neighborhood negotiating rapid change, Sanchez’s exhibition offers something rooted in an aesthetic and cultural vocabulary that speaks directly to San Antonians, Niño Harris added.
To her point, “Perspectives of Otherness” refuses to flatten identity into a single, convenient narrative. Sanchez challenges the Western impulse to categorize non-Western aesthetics as folk artifacts instead of fine art. In his hands, the past isn’t only something to recover, but something we can reimagine.
Free, 2-5 p.m. Saturday, June 20 and Saturday, June 27, Thrd Space Studio, 1906 S. Flores St., instagram.com/thrd_space_satx.
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