Angel Baby

Working in a variety of media—including performance art under the drag persona Rosa de la Montaña—Teddy Sandoval employs symbols from his Mexican and Chicano background to address issues of sexual and ethnic identity. Largely ignored by galleries and museums in Los Angeles, he and other queer Latinx artists founded their own alternative art spaces and publications, such as the Butch Gardens School of Art—a Mail Art project named after a Latino gay bar in the neighborhood of Silver Lake—and the magazine "Homeboy Beautiful". In "Angel Baby", the hand of God confronts the Mesoamerican feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl, who is suspended above a winged boxer. The boxer, both hyper-masculine and angelic, bears a single teardrop tattoo and confronts the viewer with a soft, calm expression. Sandoval has presented this guardian angel as a boxer meant to protect against violence, AIDS, war, and discrimination of all kinds.