Location: Richmond, CA
Medium: Performance, sculpture, drawing, music
Website: niadart.org
Jonathan Velazquez (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Richmond, California, where he has worked at NIAD Art Center since 2007. NIAD (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development) is a nonprofit studio and gallery in Richmond supporting artists with developmental and intellectual disabilities, and Velazquez has spent nearly two decades there building a practice that moves fluidly between performance, sculpture, drawing, and music.
At NIAD, Velazquez was instrumental in founding the studio’s Music and Performance department, where his durational performance work draws on the opulence and absurdity of celebrity culture. He crafts personas of musicians and public figures — including Michael Jackson, Espinosa Paz, Los Tigres del Norte, and Daddy Yankee — as well as professional archetypes such as clergy, doctors, and businessmen, building the props, costumes, and bricolage instruments each role requires out of paper, tape, clay, found objects, and fabric. He also records original music: his solo album of Spanish-language ballads, Jonathan del Norte, was released on NIAD’s in-house label, NIAD Sound Recordings.
His works on paper have entered institutional collections including the Mills College Art Museum (now part of Northeastern University’s museum system), Stanford Health Care, and UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, and he has performed and exhibited at venues including SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum of California, Elbow Room in Portland, and Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York.
Velazquez’s practice treats the studio as a stage: he immerses himself completely in a chosen persona, shape-shifting between singer, cleric, doctor, or executive, with meticulously built props and costumes assembled from cast-off materials. The performances share a vocabulary with his drawings, which are rendered almost exclusively in marker for their vivid color and typically depict portraits of people who matter to him — often NIAD staff — surrounded by recurring heart motifs, repeated words that function like choruses, and dense, staccato patterns drawn from pop-culture iconography and film. Music runs through both bodies of work: Velazquez, who helped found NIAD’s Music and Performance program, channels the same fandom and devotion into original ballads as he does into his portraits and personas.
One notable departure from this vocabulary is his 2016 Untitled, held in the Mills College Art Museum’s collection, in which he altered found photographs from Sally Mann’s 1980s family photobook — adding red bodysuits and lipstick to the child subjects — a détournement that surfaces questions about projected femininity and the performance of childhood.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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