Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño

When interdisciplinary artist Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño’s mother died from health complications during the pandemic, his grief was unimaginable. “It broke me,” he says. He remembers the months that followed as “a really difficult time,” compounded by the debilitating flare-up of an old back injury. After a negative experience with a chiropractor, Sahagún Nuño discovered curanderismo, a holistic Indigenous healing practice that originates from Mexico and Central and South America. “It was through that medicine that I started to feel better and crawl out of that space of spiritual, physical, and mental pain,” he says. After one healing session, he had an epiphany: that he should merge his art practice with curanderismo because of the “parallels between the artist and the healer, and also because I started to fall in love with learning about my ancestors.” The resulting works—a series of multimedia portraits of his family in the style of 16th-century Spanish nobility—have been exhibited around the country, from Los Angeles to Chicago.

Sahagún Nuño’s begins his portrait sessions with conversation, during which he hopes to make his sitters feel comfortable enough to share their emotional pain. Throughout the session, the portrait becomes a sort of “energetic cleansing” as he calls it. “In order to facilitate healing or bring closure to the story, we do spirit retrieval,” he says. “I use a medicine wheel to connect with my ancestors to seek guidance and draw while contacting the spirit realm.” He then transfers the drawing to oriented strand board, or OSB, a type of wood made of compressed lumber scraps. The OSB reminds Sahagún Nuño of his own identity as an immigrant laborer—something that defies being “stamped with stereotypes” and viewed as disposable. He hopes that his sitters instead “feel like royalty.” For example, a portrait of his cousin Tatí, who was battling severe depression at the time of the sitting, gained popular attention after its first gallery showing. “Imagine you’re in Mexico and you’re going through this depression, and all of a sudden you’re seeing yourself in a magazine and on Instagram,” he says. “It’s like the final ritual reminding them that they are beautiful and they are art. I know that sounds cheesy, but to have that attention, that worthiness, it’s helping them.”