Theodore Villa
Theodore Villa’s work has been shown at many museums, including the Museum of Northern Arizona, The Kimball Art Center, UT, Centro Washington Irving in Madrid, Spain, The Heard Museum, AZ, the Center for Contemporary Arts, WA, Millicent Rogers Museum, NM, Institute of American Indian Art, NM, the Taylor Museum, CO, the Museum of the Rockies, MT, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, CA, Palais de Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, Sun Valley Center for the Arts, ID, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, Purdue University Gallery, IN, Newport Harbor Museum of Art, CA, Palm Springs Museum of Art, CA, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, MN, the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, CA, and the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA.
Born in Santa Barbara, California, Theodore Villa was raised by his maternal grandmother of White Mountain Apache (Coyotero) and Spanish ancestry. He gained a Bachelors of Fine Arts, followed by a Masters, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His grandmother’s stories and legends are one of the primary sources through which Villa culls his inspiration for his watercolor paintings. Rendered in vibrant washes, the compositions reverberate with echoes from the past while delivering their message in dynamic contemporary terms. A tactile quality carries throughout his works, beads render a shiny brilliance, buckskin looks like hand-tanned leather, fur looks real and feathers warrant closer inspection. In opposition to most static museum displays, Theodore’s works have life, motion and humor. Fringe floats, balance emerges—that between illusion and allusion.
