Julio César Morales

Employing a range of media and visual strategies, artist, educator, and curator Julio César Morales explores issues of migration, underground economies, and labour, on personal and global scales. Morales works by whatever means necessary to explore social interaction and political perspectives, from watercolour drawings that diagram human trafficking, to music and installation that responds to transcontinental cultural flows. International exhibitions include the Lyon Biennial; Istanbul Biennial; LACMA; Singapore Biennale; Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Prospect 3 Biennale in New Orleans, to name a few. Since 2013 he is the curator of visual arts at Arizona State University Art Museum.

Club Unicornio was founded in 2002 by visual artist Julio Cesar Morales and musician Luis Illades as an urban intervention in San Francisco’s Mission District as a direct response to “reclaim” and bring back the ambient sounds of Latino–based music to the streets of the district. The club has since morphed into a record label called Discos Unicornio, a space for collaboration between visual artists, musicians and DJ’s. Named after the now defunct Tijuana strip club, Club Unicornio specialized in obscure and underground Spanish language music -- from Mexican dance punk, rare Latin breaks, to the newest in electro cumbia and beyond.  Club Unicornio has performed at the Whitney Biennale, New York; Istanbul Biennale, Turkey; Singapore Biennale, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico; SFMOMA, San Francisco; MUCA Roma, Mexico City amongst others museums, galleries and house parties.