Porfirio Gutiérrez is a multidisciplinary textile artist and cultural innovator whose work brings the cultural and artistic legacies of his Zapotec heritage into dialogue with the visual languages of Modernism. His practice addresses migration, climate and identity while challenging dominant perceptions of art in relation to ancestral creative knowledge.

Based in Ventura, California, Gutiérrez was born and raised in the Zapotec textile community of Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. His contemporary experiences—alongside the ancestral knowledge systems that formed him as an artist—offer new ways of seeing art today.

While there is no direct translation for “artist” in Zapotec, there exists a long-held cultural understanding that honors those who carry that responsibility within their communities. Gutiérrez centers his practice in this understanding, embodying that role through large-scale installations, performances, textile sculptures, and woven works that expand the language of Zapotec weaving traditions.

Gutiérrez has been featured in ARTnews, The New York Times, PBS, BBC London, Vogue, and Artforum. In 2026, he received an Artist Residency from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and was nominated for both the 2026 USA Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship. In 2015, he was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s Artist Leadership Fellowship. In 2021, he received the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, and in 2023 he was a finalist for the Frieze Art Prize.

Gutiérrez has taught materials and color at Harvard University and serves as an advisor to the Smithsonian Institution.

His work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tucson Museum of Art. A selection of Gutiérrez’s dye materials has also been documented and added to the Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes Pigment Collection, a world-renowned archive of artist materials.

His work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Chinati Foundation, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, the Sharjah Institute for Heritage in the United Arab Emirates, and the Embassy of the United States in Mexico City, among others.