The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars, 2025
Site-responsive installation at the Visual Arts Center (V.A.C.), gathering drawings, prints, paintings, interactive sculptures, and remnants of performance into a constellation of queer world-building.
Part of the 2025 MFA Thesis Show Acceleration without Arrival
April 18 – May 10, 2025
A flower
Camcorder footage
a harmonica
a megaphone,
and Larry Mitchell's The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions
Photo documentation by Alex Boschenstein
The Tiger
Dubious bodies of water, 2024
Gouache on paper
The Tiger and the Spigot consider the Stars, 2025
An improvisational performance exploring cartoon being as choreography, play as a radical tool to engage with our surroundings, and the precarity of everyday erotics. Developed through 16 hours of rehearsal and presented as three 45-minute public showings as part of the Cohen New Works Festival 2025, organized by UT Theatre and Dance.
Created in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Sofie Cardinal, Angel Blanco, Emily Heath, Aída Hernandez-Reyes, Sam Mandelbaum, Micah Senter, Katherine Vaughn, and Joshua Winn.
On a patch of grass, behind the Winship Drama Building
No I, no here, no now, 2024
A body of work comprised of monotypes, frescos, and porcelain bones, exploring queer embodiment and temporality through playful yet distressed cartoon figures that blur boundaries between self, others, and landscape. Drawing on cartoon logic and archaeological forms, it envisioned a collective origin myth beyond linear time and singular identity.
Bent, 2024
Over, 2024
You Are Here, 2023
A solo show gathering work created over five years living and working in Williamstown, MA. Through cartoon forms blurring reality and imagination, the work reflected on identity, distance, and the search for belonging. It examined how being and feeling out of place can open new ways of understanding ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
collection of weapons found in the empty lot next to my house, sticks, metal, twine, colored pencils on rocks, paper, and a fly, 2022
nowhere, hand-sewn quilt, 2021
about
Javier Robelo (b.2000) is multidisciplinary artist from Managua, Nicaragua. He makes drawings, prints, sculptures, costumes, and performances that excavate and celebrate queer feeling. Using a cartoon-like figurative style, he abstracts personal experiences into the essence of being and being with others. The distressed yet playful characters inhabiting his work bend over, twist, and stumble; they melt into each other, dissolve into the landscape, and are weathered by time. Across mediums, Javier finds beauty in the pathetic, courage in vulnerability, and liberation in feeling out-of-place.
Javier received his BA in Art History and Studio Art from Williams College and is pursuing an MFA in Printmaking and Sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin. He has exhibited his work at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts (Pittsfield, MA), The Arts Center of the Capital Region (Troy, NY), The Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), The Joseph Gross Gallery at the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), and the Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX).
