Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Photography, Sculpture, Performance, Books & Prints, Film
Website: jaimecortez.org
Jaime Cortez is a Chicano-American visual artist, graphic novelist, writer, teacher, and performer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born in San Juan Bautista, California, and raised in Watsonville, he was the first in his family to graduate from college, earning a B.A. in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. He later completed an M.F.A. in Art Practice at UC Berkeley in 2006. Over more than two decades, Cortez has been a central figure in the Bay Area arts ecosystem, working as a program manager at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco’s Mission District, director of grantmaking at the San Francisco Arts Commission, program officer at the San Francisco Foundation, and, most recently, Program Officer for Performing Arts at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
His debut short story collection, Gordo (Black Cat / Grove Atlantic, 2021), is a semi-autobiographical work set in migrant farm worker camps near Watsonville during the 1970s, following a young queer, fat Mexican protagonist through humor, desire, and hardship. The book was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named among the best books of the year by NPR and BookPage. Earlier, Cortez authored and illustrated Sexile/Sexilio (2004), a bilingual graphic biography of Adela Vasquez, a trans woman who fled Cuba in the Mariel boatlift and became a prominent HIV and trans rights activist in San Francisco—widely recognized as one of the first trans narratives in American comics.
Cortez is also a longtime LGBTQ+ rights activist and HIV/AIDS prevention educator. He is a Lucas Artists Literary Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center and is currently developing a feature film about the Clarion Alley Mural Project in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Cortez moves fluently between literary and visual forms, producing short fiction, graphic novels, drawings, sculpture, and photography across named series including Self-Evident, DiviNation, Universal Remote, Another Hero, Indelible, and the Salvage Series. His work centers on what he describes as “resilient survivors living on the margins of the economy, the law, and social acceptability”—farm workers, queer Latinx youth, transgender activists—deploying humor and a sharp eye for communal joy to illuminate structural precarity without reducing subjects to their circumstances. His fiction draws extensively on his own experience growing up in California’s agricultural communities, and his visual art often interrogates the formation of national and cultural identity.
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