Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art at the Vincent Price Art Museum

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Teddy Sandoval, Chili Colorado (c. late 1970s). Lithograph with collage, 13 × 10 inches. Image courtesy of Paul Polubinskas,
Teddy Sandoval Estate.
Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

From its title, Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, which recently closed at the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM), sounds like the retrospective of a collective, centered around one prominent member. But the “Butch Gardens School of Art” was a fictional entity created by Teddy Sandoval, the school’s sole member. The school’s name, derived from a ’70s gay bar in Silver Lake, is rooted in irony and satire, like much of Sandoval’s work. Butch? Sandoval’s art was unapologetically queer in the way that it played with tropes of masculinity. Gardens? He rarely featured a bucolic setting. Instead, he used graffiti, cityscapes, and decorative designs as backdrops for his “butch” gay figures. The show featured 25 years of ceramics, prints, drawings, paintings, mail art, and Xeroxes, and evident in all these works is Sandoval’s consistent challenge to the symbols of late twentieth-century masculinity he found in the post-liberation gay scene and Chicanx culture.

The curators of the VPAM exhibition, Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, combined Sandoval’s mixed-media works with art by others who could have been members of the Butch Gardens School. The choice to show Sandoval’s work alongside other artists— contemporaries, friends, and those he never knew (artist Moises Salazar Tlatenchi was born in 1996, the year after Sandoval’s death)—shows both his influence and a common style. The most frequent motif in Sandoval’s queer portraiture is a face defined solely by hair. Sandoval isn’t alone in depicting anonymous queer figures, as work by other artists in the exhibition attests. Colombian artist Ever Astudillo’s two large pencil-on-paper drawings show near-naked men with sculpted abs and blurry heads dancing tightly together (Untitled, c. 1980s), and three men spaced out on the same street cruising one another (Sábado, 1988). Nothing is more anonymous than cruising, and Astudillo’s angles, shadow, and distance hide these men’s faces. Ginger Brooks Takahashi reinterpreted an unattributed 1970s drawing of men sitting nakedly at Julius, a historic gay bar in Manhattan, by placing stickers—an intersex/unisex symbol, “An ENBY was here,” and “A lesbian was here”—over the already faceless heads of several naked gay male subjects (Julius Bootleg [We are here; still seeking Lowry], 1978/2007/2023). Joey Terrill’s silkscreen, Brothers (1975), shows two identical men in sunglasses, handlebar ’staches, jeans, and tees. Pages from Terrill’s zineHomeboy Beautiful (1978–79)—a satirical lifestyle magazine for “Homo-Homeboys” that features sexual drawings, collages, and an advice column with questions answered by “Lil Loca”—include mail art contributed by Sandoval, showing these friends’ shared style and tongue-in-cheek playfulness that needled the machismo prevalent in their community.

The mustaches on the anonymous men in Sandoval and Terrill’s work define them as “Castro clones,” a term coined in the 1970s to label the uniform ersatz-butch aesthetic that queered dress associated with working-class masculinity. Clones wore flannels, too-tight Levis and leather boots, and they all had facial hair. Sandoval recognized and lampooned this butch drag in more abstract works like Chili Chaps (1978), a pair of cardboard fringed chaps decorated with dried beans and clay chilis, playing on the image of the Mexican vaquero and the queer culture of leather bars. Sandoval’s more direct depictions of hustlers, cowboys, daddies, and homeboys are almost all faceless and only recogniz-able through fetishized clothes. The lithograph Chili Colorado (c. late 1970s) depicts a face-less man naked except for white, chili-printed briefs. His cocked hip says come-hither—no bedroom eyes needed. Meanwhile, in Untitled (Cowboy) (c. late 1970s–80s), a cowboy in a 10-gallon hat with a bushy mustache and an open shirt puffs out his chest as if to push away anyone who might approach him. These figural works, like many others by Sandoval, feature graphic patterns in the background: Chili Colorado is printed on black with white pinstripes, while Cowboy is framed by a golden geometric art deco motif, juxtaposing the rural vaquero with a design associated with urban edifices.

Gender identity was Sandoval’s constant preoccupation. He balanced his hyper-butch clones with his own feminine drag. In the photo series La Historia de Frida Kahlo (1978), Sandoval dresses as Kahlo, while Gronk, a founding member of the collective Asco and regular at the Butch Gardens bar,¹ plays Diego Rivera. Sandoval’s drag persona, Rosa de la Montaña (the name a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s drag alter ego, Rrose Sélavy),² is depicted in the exhibition through several color photo-copies, postcards, and  a black-and-white print called Rosa (1976). In this print, Rosa is faceless except  for a small line that could be a thin mustache or a full lip. She poses with her shoulder forward and head flirtingly tipped back, parted curls flowing. The background features what look like dried chilis from a distance, but upon a closer look, they are more clearly labia. Another drawing by Sandoval—rare for its large size—shows a bald femme figure surrounded by halved peaches that also resemble anuses (Untitled, 1976). As with the gender of his figures, Sandoval seems to imply that it does not matter which it is—why not both?

Sandoval’s humor served as a necessary balm to the self-serious butchness of the 1970s gay scene. And while there is an ever-evolving understanding of gender in our queer community, art like Sandoval’s, which satirized the inherent patriarchal fetishes and the obsession with masculinity, is still import-ant in 2024. I went to the closing of the show at VPAM on a Saturday afternoon, and, later that night, I went to the Eagle. I saw someone in a T-shirt with a graphic of a near-naked man in leather chaps and a face defined solely by a mustache, and  I asked him if it was a Teddy Sandoval image. The shirt was a gift, he said, so he didn’t know, but the image, whether Sandoval’s or not, was of the ether of the Butch Gardens School of Art: a great sexy parody of an aesthetic we can recognize, even fetishize, while also recognizing and laughing at the artifice.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 36.

Philip Anderson writes fiction and criticism. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, an artist, and their two cats, Sherwood and Blue Ivan.

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