We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Luis Alonso Sanchez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Luis Alonso, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

Since I was a kid I’ve leaned towards creative or artistic interactions, such as drawing as a main activity throughout my school life, at the same time understanding my family’s history through their creative labor, like my grandparents and mother working their barbershop/salon and a flower shops has been an important part of my life, and it made my decision to live around creativity and art easier, I decided to go to art school at 18, where I met a few amazing artists and friends who I still collaborate with after 10 years, after 1 year in art school I began to pursue a professional career in art while being in school, began to work as an assistant at a gallery and for different artists, since then I have been doing art as a way of getting to know the world, creating different projects and meeting incredible people.

Luis Alonso, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I work around various subjects in my art practice, currently I run a contemporary art gallery called Sala de Espera (The waiting room), an artist run space inside a semi abandoned hospital from the 50s in Tijuana Mx. with my colleague Talia P. Gilbert, so for the last 4 years I’ve been involved in developing different art shows nationally and Internationally with amazing artists in different scenarios inside and outside of our spooky headquarters in cities like Los Angeles ( Torrance Art Museum), Ciudad de México ( Material Art Fair), and The Hague (Home Gallery). While I’ve been doing this curatorial work around this building which I think is a very important example of border city history that usually gets wiped out through a current gentrification process that my hometown is living, I’ve been calling this place my studio and my home, thinking of myself as one of the patients that once healed inside this place, where I’ve been producing my latest’s bodies of work, Doing experimental materic paintings/drawings, where I dialogue mainly with art history specifically in painting with my pandemic series ” No oyes ladrar a los perros “(2020) which was presented in FAMA ( Feria de Arte Mexicano Accessible ) , or in ” Starting dialogues with deceased colleagues” where I communicate with dead artists through my work like Mike Kelley and Martin Kippenberger doing self-portraits as a main motive through a painting diary with different kind of inks on butcher shop paper . Sometimes I like getting involved with gastronomic projects making sculptures that activate as grills that cook clams or meat collaborating with different chefs and making metal chairs that turn in to bottle openers and we end up having a party or a dinner with friends and strangers ,like in my last solo show at Two Rooms in SD Ca. ” La Leyenda Negra “. My practice has been expanding over the years in to different areas. It depends on what I’m seeing and living at the moment and where I feel that I can start a conversation with someone else through art.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Support and buy art from living artists, investigate what’s going on around your creative and artistic local community, work with different cultural managers and artists, and take some time of your day to hear and pay attention to what they are thinking or speaking of.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Connecting with amazing people, artists and creatives I think is the most rewarding part, connecting with the other. That being sad, being able to do Art for a living is an interesting path that Im understanding every step of the way, and even if it gets rough sometimes you can enjoy every second of it, I think Art has helped me become the person I am today and that is rewarding too.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://saladespera.cargo.site/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alonsoxluis/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luis-alonso-s%C3%A1nchez-9a0a41116/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@saladeespera4258
• Other: [email protected]

Image Credits
Lile Kvantaliani Nicolas Padilla Eduardo Trejo Omar Delgado