Julia Weber
Staff writer
“Likeness” exhibiting artist Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño will deliver the penultimate presentation in the 2025 Chautauqua Visual Arts Lecture Series at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Hultquist Center.
For Sahagún Nuño, lectures like this one are a way to foster vulnerability and openness through candid dialogues about his artistic practice.
“I really love doing artist talks,” he said. “I’m working toward perfecting them, whatever that means for me, but it does bring up insecurities. There’s a group of people coming to listen to me talk about something that is like sharing my diary. The work that I’m doing, this isn’t coming through ego, but it’s coming through vulnerability where it’s like uncharted territory.”
Sahagún Nuño sees visual art as being a healing practice with immense potential for restoration. His practice incorporates many materials — some industrial, some natural — to enact healing for the subjects of his paintings. For him, painting is a ritual of healing in which he engages with his subject to explore and heal from the adversity they have faced in their lives.
During his lecture, Sahagún Nuño said audience members may “expect a fellow human that is experiencing life.” He said that he “doesn’t have things figured out,” but uses art as a method of community-building and finding ways to be engaged in and support the communities he is a part of.
He said he hopes to engage with audience members in an “honest, sincere” conversation and foster a trusting space that allows everyone to be open and vulnerable.
“Maybe if the opportunity arises, (we can) have critical and important conversations (about) things that are currently happening in our times,” he said. “Whether it’s the political administration, whether it’s about healing, whether it’s about suffering.”
For the artist, his work transcends the individual nature of each portrait. Instead, it’s a way of understanding his community and finding ways to heal and restore the emotional, psychological and physical well-being of those he is close with.
“This work really doesn’t belong to me, and this work really isn’t about the individual portraits. It’s really about us,” he said. “It’s really a reflection about how we are all currently — regardless of race, class and gender — going through a moment where we need healing, where we need community, where we need attention and we need love and we need patience and we need forgiveness.”
