Porfirio Gutierrez

Porfirio Gutierrez is a California-based textile artist and natural dyer, born and raised in the richly historic Zapotec textile community of Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. He grew up immersed in color and surrounded by the wildness of Oaxaca's mountains, and by the knowledge of plants for healing and for color. His life’s work has been revitalizing and preserving traditional Zapotec natural dye techniques with a focus on reinterpreting traditional textiles and materials. 

Gutíerrez’s art practice maintains his ancestor’s spiritual belief in nature as a living being, sacred and divine. His grounding in Zapotec traditional knowledge manifests in his textiles, reinterpreting the traditional weaving language, subverting and re-imagining the symbols and forms, morphing his textile designs toward the fractal forms and spaces of architecture and the movement he sees in cities and urban environments. His designs draw deeply on his experiences of two cultures, moving between the traditional and the modern, but always reliant on the deep knowledge and spiritual dimensions of his work.

The story of his art has been told in ARTnews, The New York Times, PBS, and the BBC London. Gutíerrez has been featured in Vogue Magazine and the Smithsonian’s American Indian Magazine. In 2015, he received the Smithsonian Institution’s Artist in Leadership fellow, and in 2021 he received the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize. His work is in the collection of LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum, Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Indian, and the Tucson Museum of Art. A selection of Gutiérrez dye materials was also documented and added to Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes Pigment Collection, the world-renowned archive of artist materials. His work has exhibited nationally and internationally including at Chinati Museum, Black Mountain Collage Museum + Arts Center, Sharjah Institute for Heritage, United Arab Emirates, among others.