WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.- The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a $42,000 Curatorial Fellowship to C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz to prepare a major retrospective of artist Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995) scheduled for 2022–23 at the Williams College Museum of Art and the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College.

Chavoya, professor of Art and Latina/o Studies at Williams College, last teamed up with independent curator Frantz to co-curate the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., jointly organized by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in 2017. Axis Mundo subsequently traveled to venues across the United States through Independent Curators International (ICI) and was presented at the Williams College Museum of Art from Sept. 6–Dec. 9, 2019. This exhibition explored the intersections among a network of more than 50 artists and was the first of its kind to excavate histories of experimental art practice, collaboration, and exchange by a group of Los Angeles-based queer Chicanx artists between the late 1960s and early 1990s.

The Warhol Fellowship, announced June 24, will support Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art. Sandoval, whose work was also included in Axis Mundo and is also a part of the museum’s collection, was a central figure in intersecting queer and Chicanx artistic circles in Los Angeles, as well as an active participant in international avant-garde movements. His life and career were cut short by HIV/AIDS in 1995. The forthcoming exhibition will illuminate Sandoval’s diverse creative output, focusing on prints, ceramics, mail art, and multiples. It will chart his engagement with gender play and tropes of masculinity, the (queer) domestic sphere, and camp as a tactic of political refusal.




The Curatorial Fellowship will enable Chavoya and Frantz to conduct new research to situate Sandoval’s practice within a genealogy of queer Latinx and Latin American artistic experimentation. The curators plan to travel to Colombia, Brazil, Ottawa, San Francisco, and elsewhere to visit studios of living artists or their estates and archives.

“Throughout the process of organizing Axis Mundo, we always had our eye on revisiting Teddy’s work and showing it in greater depth,” explain Chavoya and Frantz. “This fellowship enables us to further explore his importance while charting new trajectories for thinking about intersectional Latinx and queer art histories across the Americas.”

Launched in 2008, the Curatorial Fellowships from the Warhol Foundation aim to encourage curatorial research leading to new scholarship in the field of contemporary art. Grants of up to $50,000 are designed to support travel, archival research, convening of colleagues, and interviews.

Pamela Franks, Class of 1956 Director, states, “At Williams College Museum of Art, we are deeply committed to advancing new art historical research, especially of understudied artists in the collection. We are immensely grateful to the Warhol Foundation for its support of Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz’s retrospective of Sandoval’s work, and are delighted to collaborate with another college art museum to share this exhibition with the public.”