Self-Portrait in a Complex Mirror

“In the 1830s, you start getting away from that Baroque Mexican feel to a straight-up Indigenous idea of perspective and landscape and animation,” he tells me, pointing to a painting by the artist known as the Santo Niño Santero for his many images of the Holy Child. “Even the color palettes—you start thinking, What trade is coming up? What colors are being discovered and sent to the Americas? You start seeing this salmon color.”

He pauses to complain about the scholarly tradition of referring to santero artists by anonymous nicknames. “When I say this is a José Manuel Benavides,” he says, calling the Santo Niño Santero by his given name, “people be like, huh?” He shrugs, making a face. “Which just sucks. How do we give those names back to them?”

AS A TORCHBEARER OF THE MOST recognizably New Mexican art form, Telles is having a very good year.

Born in 1983 and raised in Albuquerque’s South Valley, he began making traditional retablos the old-fashioned way, using natural pigments on homemade gesso and carved varnished wood, in his twenties. He then branched into contemporary territory with paintings that use both Catholic and of-the-moment iconography to comment on borderlands culture as well as Hispano, Chicano, and New Mexico history and cultural currents.

In 2025, his work is set to be shown in exhibitions opening at the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona; the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos; Presa House Gallery in San Antonio, Texas; and at Santa Fe’s Traditional Spanish Market in July.

The museum we’re standing in just acquired Telles’s extraordinary new carved retablo, Nuestra Señora de Tsa'majo/Chimayó, for its permanent collection. He is also a finalist in the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial contest, The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, featuring works from artists in 14 states and set to open in May. (“First born-and-bred Nuevomexicano/a from and in New Mexico to be part of the portrait competition,” he proudly texted me.)

Last fall, an exhibition he curated, Rendered Presence: Artistas de Nuevo México, opened at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, a few miles from where Telles grew up as a kid of working-class parents in the Atrisco barrio. A survey of Hispanic New Mexican identity in contemporary art, Rendered Presence (through July 27) features pieces by 13 artists across a variety of mediums, including a self-portrait by Telles.

“It’s really important to bring in people outside of the staff so that they can share their vision of what Hispanic, Latinx, Chicano art looks like,” says Jadira Gurulé, the National Hispanic Cultural Center art museum and visual arts program manager. She chose Telles to guest-curate Rendered Presence for both his artistic and curatorial work. “He’s extraordinarily knowledgeable,” she says. “But he’s also always focused on strengthening the community and the network, making sure that people get connected with each other.”

In 2022 and 2023, Telles co-curated Son de Allá y Son de Acá, or They Are From There and They Are From Here, a much-seen traveling exhibition featuring more than 60 artists from across the Southwest that stressed the importance of fellowship among Chicanx and Latinx artists of the region. Telles and Santa Clara Pueblo artist Jason Garcia have teamed up in exhibitions at Albuquerque’s Gallery Hózhó and Santa Fe’s Hecho a Mano. “When we’ve done our collaborative pieces, we’re thinking of similar ideas,” Garcia says, noting their shared appreciation for using natural pigments.

A work in the exhibition Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of Malinche, which came to the Albuquerque Museum in 2022, contains separate elements depicting the traditional Matachines dance from Garcia’s Pueblo perspective and Telles’s Hispano lens. Another recent work plays on the duality of the December 12 saint day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the same day—not coincidentally, says Garcia—that Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo celebrates their feast day.

Similar connective elements are on display in the vibrant Cobija de Corazones (Blanket of Hearts), the 2023 Telles self-portrait featured in Rendered Presence. It’s part of the same series, Cobijas de Mis Madres (Blankets of My Mothers), as the piece the artist entered in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery competition. In both, Telles paints himself with different burlap pinto bean sacks over his head. Cobija de Corazones shows his seated figure wearing an El Toro Pinto Beans bag and a mossy green T-shirt the artist often wears. It reads, “Cultura,” although both the first and last letters are obscured. A colorful patchwork quilt is draped over his shoulders, and in his right hand, he cradles a pigeon with a Country Crock margarine tub over its head.

Telles starts to free-associate when discussing the traditional gesso-on-panel painting, drawing intersections between its different ways of branding the person it represents. “During Covid, I was thinking about the comforts of home,” he says. “In the series there are a bunch of quilts or blankets my grandma stitched, so it’s an homage to her.”

He goes on, reminiscing about growing up in the 1980s, watching TV commercials and then craving brand-new toys, store-bought blankets, and retail  items over homespun heirlooms like a handmade quilt. “There’s this rejection of where you lie socially,” he says. “There are these titles, like being called a beaner. But then it’s like, We’ve got to take that back, because there was always some form of protein around us. Beans took care of us in hard times.”

He smirks at the Country Crock container, a sure sign of a thrifty home cook. “What’s in it? Is it the lard? Is it the beans? Is it red chile? Is it leftovers?” he asks. “It’s the resourcefulness of my grandma’s generation.”

In the art museum, Telles has placed his work next to a multimedia textile piece, Tortilla Warmer by Isabela Ortega, born in 2002 and a former student of Telles’s from the Albuquerque arts organization Working Classroom. A juxtaposition of quilted secondhand fabrics and polypropylene pinto bean bags, Ortega’s work is uniquely in conversation with his portrait.

“Tortillas have come to represent Nuevomexicano and Mexican identities,” the museum’s text panel reads. “Their attributes range from derogatory stereotypes to an important food that sparks a proud sense of belonging. Tortilla Warmer highlights the sentiment that as long as there is a body in need of warmth, we will find a way, conflating the body and the tortilla into one.”

A walk through Rendered Presence crystallizes more connective threads between the works. Photographer Gabriela Campos’s striking black-and-white print, Lillyana, Barelas, shows a gorgeous woman celebrating the lowrider tradition in a nearby neighborhood. Beside it, MESTIZAJE—a large-scale painting by Eric Romero, an artist with Genízaro roots—depicts a nude goddess-like figure against a recognizably New Mexican high desert landscape. Both elements vibrate off Romero’s gold-framed canvas, teeming with a distinct sense of place and belonging.

“VICENTE’S REALLY A SCHOLAR,” says Charles M. Carrillo, a career santero from Albuquerque who is on the cusp of his seventies. A 1995 book of Carrillo’s early works, Tradition and Soul, was one of the first Telles seized upon when he decided to try his hand at the traditional art form. “When I first saw his work,” Carrillo says, “I was impressed because it appeared to me that he was paying attention to iconography.”

That was around 2017, after Telles’s first Traditional Spanish Market in Santa Fe. He entered the juried market a decade or so after he dropped out of the University of New Mexico to pursue a lucrative job at a Los Angeles–based contemporary art fabrication company. Before that, his Chicano studies professor told the class something he never forgot.

“He said that when tourists visit New Mexico, there’s this folk idea that every Native they meet is a silversmith, and every Hispano is a santero,” Telles recalls. “And I was like, What the hell is a santero?” Despite having been confirmed at Holy Family Catholic Church on Atrisco Drive (where a Telles altar now has a place of pride), the burgeoning artist had no idea of the rich regional visual traditions that underpinned his faith.

He got some books on santos and tried his hand at painting on tin and wood. “I met Charlie Carrillo, and he was like, ‘Here’s some things that you should read,’ ” Telles remembers. “And I was like, Man, I need to get into the books.”

Judging from the piles of antiquarian texts sprouting in his South Valley studio, he’s become a prolific reader on his art, having learned to haunt used bookstores, library and estate sales, and AbeBooks online for scarce scholarship on santos and santeros. He sounds rhapsodic about finally tracking down a physical copy, for his personal library, of a key New Mexico Magazine article in an early and influential series. “That was my Holy Grail: 1935, March, April, and May,” he crows. “One of the first articles by a Nuevomexicano about the santos. It took me more than a decade, 15 years, to find that.”

“Anything in the last 100 years that was written about santos—newspaper articles, journals, magazines, stuff from other parts of the world—he really chased those down,” Carrillo says. “I’ll be honest with you: He’s got the most impressive library of any living santero.”

Carrillo adds enticingly that he and Telles have recently been studying the identity of the artist heretofore known only as the Laguna Santero, for the large altar screens he painted in the churches at Laguna and Acoma pueblos. They’re getting ready to tell the public his name.

IN THE HUSHED SILENCE OF THE museum storage, Telles recalls the times the traditional authenticity of his pieces has been called into question by Spanish Market juries in Santa Fe. “They said I couldn’t use gold leaf,” he says, pointing out a centuries-old santo that sits in one drawer. “Look at this piece: The corners are gold leaf. Bullshit, I can’t use gold leaf or copper—go into your own archive.”

Doubt—and research—comprise the backbone of both Telles’s faith and his artistic didacticism. He remembers a formative remark from a priest at a youth retreat. “He said you need to question everything, everyone. You gotta question what you’re learning. Question the Bible, because without that you don’t get an understanding of who you are and how this can be important.”

Last year, Telles waded into the public debate over the Harwood Museum of Art’s 2024 exhibition Unknown Santeros. To discuss the controversy over the Taos museum having not attributed works to some exhibited “anonymous” santeros, despite contemporary and local santeros having done research that indicated the artists’ identities, Telles joined fellow artists Romero and Brandon Maldonado to speak out on KUNM’s Raíces radio program.

“We need to have people who are creators speak on our own art form,” he says. When curatorial matters get into the distinction—often made by the same visitors his Chicano studies professor called out—between art and folk art, Telles returns to that priest of his youth. “Question everything!” he says. “Because then you grow. Maybe that’s what it comes down to: You become a folk artist when you’re done learning, when you’re done experimenting.”

Before he made the drive from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, he forgot to bring the museum the recent Nuestra Señora de Tsa'majo/Chimayó acquisition. Telles promises curator Jana Gottshalk he’ll bring it by soon. Later, at home, I study an image of the exquisitely carved retablo on my screen.

Based on a Bolivian colonial painting that conflates the Virgin Mary with the Indigenous female deity called Pachamama, often identified with mountains, it shows Our Lady emerging from a salmon-colored foothill in the norteño village of Chimayó. Below her, a Hispano and an Indigenous man meet at a river. “It shows the founding of the holy spot by Don Bernardo Abeyta,” Telles tells me later, referencing the discovery story of Chimayó’s sacred soil. “It was already a holy place for the Tewa too,” he adds.

Filtering a colonial past that Telles brings into relief with a fresh desert palette, the work is clearly a masterpiece. Its materials span the centuries, layering their own identities upon the wood. “The piece is made with natural gesso, carved wood, foraged mineral pigments, commercial watercolor pigments,” he says, “and 23-karat gold leaf.”

Managing Editor Molly Boyle revisited San Miguel Chapel, next door to the magazine office, to examine the carved altar retablo by the artist known as the Laguna Santero. She looks forward to learning his name.