Discover multidisciplinary artist Tlacaelel’s one-man performance “Yo Soy Joaquín” at Taos Center for the Arts, September 20-21, 2025.
by Michael Gorman
Of my friend, I would like to say this: Tlacaelel doesn’t separate art from life. There’s an obsessive rhythm to his work—it’s physical, poetic, and always evolving. Anyone who has seen him in motion knows that Tlacaelel is not going anywhere. His story, like his art, moves forward with grace, grit, and an unrelenting soul.
On a late summer afternoon in Taos, the scent of sage lingers in the air as artist and performer Patricio Tlacaelel Trujillo y Fuentes prepares to step onto the stage as we discuss his upcoming show at the Taos Center for the Arts.
Dressed in ceremonial regalia, framed by swirling fog and dimmed lights, he becomes not just a performer but a conduit of memory, movement, and myth. This September 20 and 21, his one-man adaptation of “Yo Soy Joaquín,” Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s iconic Chicano poem, hits the stage at the TCA. For Tlacaelel, the performance is both homage and offering.
“I was born into this poem,” he says. “The sound of the Brown Berets marching in cadence still echoes within me.”
Known widely by his moniker, Tlacaelel, the artist is a force of nature in New Mexico’s artistic and cultural landscape. His multidisciplinary career spans performance, visual art, and curation, all animated by a deeply personal pursuit of expression. His works, whether danced, spoken, or delicately cut into paper, embody a rare kind of intensity—rooted in tradition and never content to remain still.
This year alone, Tlacaelel has co-curated ¡CHICANAO! Caminos Distintos, a landmark exhibition of seventy years of New Mexico’s Chicana and Chicano art at Taos’s renowned Millicent Rogers Museum, which includes his own cut-paper works. Their finely incised layers recall generations of ceremonial craft, yet his compositions hum with contemporary urgency—an aesthetic both reverent and defiant. ¡CHICANAO! Caminos Distintos is on view through November 2, 2025.
His path to this moment has been anything but linear. Born and raised in the American Southwest, he trained under celebrated modernists such as poet Owen Dodson and choreographer Paul Sanasardo, and has performed with El Teatro Campesino in California and at New York’s MoMA. Along the way, he has collected not only accolades but a fierce sense of creative independence.
Earlier this year, Tlacaelel’s cut-paper works were featured at Art Santa Fe’s 25th anniversary show, drawing attention for their layered complexity and striking cultural synthesis. Whether performing live or presenting a new visual piece, he invites his audience to look more closely: at their roots, their rituals, and the stories passed down between them.
And while his work often dances on the edge of the political, it resists easy classification. What emerges instead is something both ancient and immediate—a style, a voice, a presence.
With more projects on the horizon and ongoing representation through the Michael Gorman Gallery in Taos, Tlacaelel remains devoted to the work, however it takes shape. “I will keep going,” he says, smiling, “until they throw me away, like a little church mouse.”
To learn more, visit tlacaelelfuentes.com or michaelgormangallery.com/tlacaelel-fuentes.
