Julio César Morales | My America
Gallery Wendi Norris
436 Jackson Street, San Francisco
Gallery Wendi Norris presents My America, Julio César Morales’ sixth solo presentation with the gallery. Marking the artist’s homecoming to San Francisco after twelve years in Arizona working as a senior curator and museum director, Morales returns full-time to his multidisciplinary artmaking practice that, over the last two decades, has explored migration, labor, and underground economies. My America coincides with his first career survey, OJO, at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, on view August 7 – December 1, 2025, underscoring a pivotal career moment and the impact of his deeply rooted and continually evolving practice.
The centerpiece of My America will be a large-scale sound installation titled My America Is Not Your America, after the 2021 song of the same name by Mexico City-based musician and producer Mexican Institute of Sound, with whom Morales collaborated to compose a longer, ambient version of this song. Remixed specifically for this installation, the song will play within the booth, which accommodates two visitors at a time, an evocation of the figures Morales depicts in his Gemelos series, also on view in the exhibition. The installation, fabricated from pine and other common building materials that allude to the act and history of immigrant labor, is adorned on its exterior with a neon sculpture spelling out, in reverse, the booth’s titular phrase in an Old English typeface, a nod to Chicano lowrider culture.
This installation follows such acclaimed immersive audio/visual environments as Morales’ Migrant Dubs (2008), for which he collaborated with Eamon Ore-Giron as a part of the duo, Los Jaichackers, and which debuted in LACMA’s groundbreaking exhibition, Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement. My America Is Not Your America extends the artist’s history of addressing underground ways people reinvent music as a means of translating different cultures and negotiating one’s identity.
"Music has the power to influence social change,” says Morales. “This new body of work, created in collaboration with Mexican Institute of Sound, offers an opportunity to challenge and reimagine the concept of 'America' within the context of our current social climate."
In addition to the sound installation, the exhibition presents eight new watercolors from Morales’ Gemelos (“twins”) series. These works extend his acclaimed Undocumented Interventions, which depicted the hidden, often brutal spaces where people risk everything to cross into the United States. In Gemelos, the physical surroundings dissolve; only the entwined contours of bodies remain, transforming suffocating confines into intimate portals. This shift reveals unexpected tenderness between the figures—and invites the viewer into that closeness. The recurring theme of duality, echoed in the title of the sound installation—My America Is Not Your America—underscores the interdependence of the United States and Mexico and the fraught entanglement of their economies, cultures, and identities.
ABOUT Julio césar morales
The artistic practice of Julio César Morales (b. 1966, Tijuana) employs a range of media and visual strategies to explore issues of migration, underground economies, and labor, on personal and global scales. He works by whatever means necessary: in a series of watercolor illustrations, Morales diagramed means of human trafficking in passenger vehicles, while in other projects he employed the DJ turntable, neon signs, the historical reenactment of a famous meal, or the conventions of an artist-run gallery to explore social interaction and political perspectives.
Morales’ artwork has been shown at venues internationally, including; the Lyon Biennale, France; Istanbul Biennale, Turkey; Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles; Singapore Biennale, Singapore; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Prospect 3, New Orleans; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Museo del Barrio, New York City; The UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, amongst others. His work is in private and public collections including MoMA, New York; The Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles; The Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Deutsche Bank, Germany; and The Office of Art in Embassies. Morales has been written about in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, Art Nexus, and Art in America.
