Ruben Ochoa engages space as both a concept and form. Sourcing from construction materials associated with inherent histories, Ochoa’s works expose the ideological and broader sociopolitical and economic relationships that facilitate how the spaces we inhabit and move through are assembled. Ochoa’s photographs, sculptural installations, and performative sculptures invite the viewer to question their surroundings. His works investigate objects and materials that can easily be glossed over as mundane or merely pragmatic: concrete freeway walls, wooden ladders, ficus trees, tortillas, and vendor carts. He transforms these materials into large-scale installations through which he considers issues of social class and identity. His work regularly references Los Angeles, dealing with social issues that remain pressing. He recently reconfigured his family’s old work van into an informal, mobile art space that regularly traveled throughout LA. Another recent project draws upon personal, familial, and community histories by using a recognizable figure in Los Angeles—a fruit vendor and their cart—to tell interwoven, intergenerational stories. He draws attention to the region’s familiar fruit carts, paleteros, and flower stands, sponsoring new vendor carts and creating artwork around the project to call for solidarity with vendors.
Ochoa also uses everyday materials in two-dimensional works, where he approaches rust as a pigment and his compositions take full advantage of the unpredictable nature of the medium. Iron oxide’s effect on the canvas echoes the visible deterioration and class boundaries of a city. The end effect is trademark Ochoa—striking at the outset, and after close inspection, seething with undercurrents of biting commentary of today’s class and racial divisions.
Ruben Ochoa was born in 1974 in Los Angeles and continues to live and work there. Ochoa received his MFA in 2003 from the University of California, Irvine. In 2019, Ochoa completed Mis Marcadores, his first public art commission located at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry for the GSA Art in Architecture program. He has been the recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant, California Community Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Art + Practice, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; The Austin Contemporary, Austin, TX; and Locust Projects, Miami, FL. Group exhibitions have been at the Contemporary Austin, Austin, TX; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; the Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA. He was featured in 2008 Whitney Biennial and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA.
His work is in many public collections including, the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
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Selected Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
- 2020
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Two and Three Person Exhibitions
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Selected Group Exhibitions
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Selected Projects
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Awards, Grants and Fellowships
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Teaching Experience
- 2018
Bibliography
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Public Collections