Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Porfirio Gutierrez

Porfirio Gutierrez

Ventura, CA

An indigo-blue line travels at right angles down a butter-yellow square, which is encased in a wide, golden-yellow border in this woven textile. The blue line descends vertically except where it jogs to the right at the center, and three steps are tucked into the underside of that angle.

Camino de Agua/Path of Water

2025

This rectangular woven textile has a step-sided diamond shape at its center. The innermost shape is light, topaz blue, and the form is echoed in larger outlines in slate and denim blue against a celestial blue background. The largest shape is outlined in light blue against the darker blue background, and 40 thin braids hang down from the 40 steps created by the diamond pattern.

Ofrenda a Laura

2025

Three cobalt-blue platforms out from a slightly higher central platform in this view. In a cavernous room hung with tapestries and with marble columns, the platforms are laden with white pillar-shaped rolls of white paper, each lit at its base. Cut-outs of flowers in shades of orange and yellow are scattered around the platforms, and hundreds of angular blue butterfly shapes are hung in strips over the central platform from the ceiling above.

In Memory Of

2025

Six woven, vertically oriented rectangular panels are displayed with three to each side on marine-blue screens. At first glance the panels recall veined marble but a closer look reveals tiny shapes made up of two triangles joined at their tips in shades of pale, sapphire, or navy blue. Hundreds of these shapes suggest butterflies flitting in swirls, creating paths, or scattered across the compositions.

Migration

2024

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Porfirio Gutierrez

Porfirio is a Zapotec artist with short black hair. He wears a white and blue checked button-down shirt and looks steadily out at us from in front of rows of nopales, roughly round, flat, cactus disks, hung along wood beams.

Based in California, Porfirio Gutiérrez was born and raised in the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca. He creates large-scale installations, performances, textile sculptures, and woven works that engage with inherited knowledge, material practices, and contemporary artistic inquiry. Gutiérrez has been featured in ARTnews, The New York Times, PBS, and Artforum. In 2021, he received the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, and in 2015, he was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s Artist Leadership Fellowship. Gutiérrez has taught at Harvard University and serves as an advisor to the Smithsonian Institution. A selection of his materials have been added to Harvard's Forbes Pigment Collection. Gutiérrez’s work is held in important collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and has been exhibited at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Chinati Foundation, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the Embassy of the United States in Mexico City, among others.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2026

Website / Social Links

“ I come from a lineage of makers. Growing up in a Zapotec community, I learned that making is inseparable from knowledge, responsibility, and ways of understanding the world. Through textiles, performances, ceremonial practices, objects, and inherited knowledge, I investigate how materials carry memory and how this knowledge can be transformed through contemporary artistic practices.”