Julio Cesar Morales is currently a visiting faculty member in the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Julio Caesar Morales is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Queen's Nails Annex in San Francisco, voted "Best Rockin' Art Gallery" by the SF Weekly. Since 2003, the gallery has presented work by both emerging and established artists.

Tijuana is the largest city in the Mexican state of Baja California, situated on the U.S.-Mexico border 15 miles south of San Diego. The U.S.-Mexican border entry between San Ysidro and Tijuana is the world's busiest land border crossing. The San Diego-Tijuana Metropolitan Area serves as the largest bi-national metropolitan area that is shared between the U.S. and Mexico.

Morales' work is deeply influenced by his experiences growing up in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, which produced what he calls his "bi-cultural identity". In this KQED Public Television-produced video, hear Morales discuss his installation, There's Gonna Be Sorrow, on view at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco in 2007. In this work, Morales employs idiosyncratic symbols to express his bi-cultural identity, fusing elements of popular Mexican culture with contemporary, technology-infused aspects.

Julio Cesar Morales was featured in the 2006 MCASD exhibition Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana, the first major museum survey of Tijuana's burgeoning arts scene.

Morales sees the pushcarts as a type of folk art, mobile collages made from reassembled samples of industrial culture. The carts reflect a gift for improvisation as well as a spirit of independence and ingenuity that Morales defines as typically Tijuanaense.

Just as the pushcart vendors create their carts from a hybrid mix of recycled materials, Morales' artwork adapts multiple processes to explore this cultural phenomenon. Informal Economy Vendors began with a series of analog photographs that the artist retouched using an airbrushing technique popular in traditional Mexican portrait photography; he then scanned the images into his computer in order to use architectural rendering techniques to delineate the innovative structural features of the pushcarts.

View the artist's bio and images of his work.