Joe Peña’s paintings explore cultural, familial, and social identity, specifically in relation to his Mexican heritage. Over the past decade, his subject matter has ranged from portraits of his community to delicately rendered still lifes of meat typically prepared in Hispanic households. His most recent work shifts the focus to food trucks and storefronts depicted at night, a theme which he views as a “metaphor for the notion of home as an internal sense of place, not merely a physical location.”
Source: Los Tejanos: Chicano Art from the Cheech Marin Collection
