Josué Morales Urbina on exhibit at Leo Castelli this spring
Josué Morales Urbina is New York-based, award-winning installation and sculpture artist whose work primarily explores transcultural displacement and dépaysement: a longing for a sense of home in a foreign environment.
Morales Urbina’s career is marked by numerous accomplishments, including multiple awards, and solo and group exhibitions in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas. An alumnus of the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, he has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, La Napoule Art Foundation Résidence d’Artiste Internationale, Centrum in Washington state, GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, NARS Foundation International Artist Residency Program, School of Visual Arts Artist Residency Program, ChaNorth, and Textile Arts Center Artist in Residence 16.
In 2023, he was recognized as a sculpture finalist by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was awarded the 2024 Jersey City Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Morales Urbina has also served as a panelist for various residencies and grants. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Art History and Criticism from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Morales Urbina was born in Guatemala and has lived throughout the United States since his 20s, yet he has never felt that he fully belongs in either place. In the United States, Morales Urbina is asked about his origins. Within Latin American communities, he remains a minority within a minority. When he returns to Guatemala, his accent, his clothing, and his lived experience mark him as different, someone who seems to belong but does not. Art becomes the place where he builds a sense of home.
Foreignness and the impermanence of memory shape the installations he creates, which emerge from fragments of lived experience and materials that evoke the familiar, the perishable, and the intimate. Informed by Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space, his practice explores the in-between condition where identity is negotiated, and hybridity becomes both tension and creation. Process-oriented and meditative, his Third Culture Kid work discovers yet another Third Space through repetition, where hand and mind converge and the act of making becomes a site of belonging.
Morales Urbina gives everyday materials a sense of protagonism, allowing them to shape the work through their own tensions, fragilities, and transformations. He uses edible and biodegradable elements such as honey, milk, mandarin peels, baguettes, coffee, and plantain chips. These materials carry domestic associations and cultural histories, and within his installations, they also seek to adjust to the newly created environment, mimicking his interest in displacement and adaptation. A memory evokes a material, and the material guides the work.
Through proxemics – the language of personal space – he also treats the viewer as a material, shaping the work through their presence and movement. These environments offer a quiet home for those who live between identities, a home that speaks in many materials, many tongues. A home that disappears but is never truly gone.
Morales Urbina’s solo exhibition, “Interstices,” will be on view in Brenau’s Leo Castelli Gallery from Jan. 22 through April 2026. Join us Jan. 22, from 4:30-6:30 p.m. for the opening reception and artist talk.