Bio
The proud 18-year-old Hispanic, Joshua Cortez, is an idealistic multidisciplinary sculptor that has the passion for motivating others through his artwork. He is proud to have been a part of SAY Sí for four and a half years, focusing on abstract perspectives of everyday life. After three hard-working years of dual-credit, Joshua has accumulated 60 college credit hours from Palo Alto and will receive his Associate in Art in December. After being accepted into Tufts University, he will leave for Boston in the Fall to pursue a career in the arts.
Artist Statement
An artist, to me, is someone that chooses to look at preexisting life and reinterpret it into something that hasn’t been seen before. With that in mind, a majority of my work has always been about how we perceive the world around us, so for this work, I wanted to do something different; I wanted to take an everyday problem that happens at least once in our lives and a common phrase all kids are pressured to hear,“ Who are you?”, and “What defines you from others?”. Now as a kid myself, pursuing a field that doesn’t have great pay or proper financial stability leads many others and I to question ourselves, as if to say that ”Am I really this person? or “Is what I’m doing alright?”. It's a hard question to give a simple answer to, yet it is a question we all will have to answer for ourselves. The easiest way I have found is to see the parts that people can easily percieve and compare them to how I view myself. It is up to us as individuals to find who we want to be within ourselves rather than pay attention to what others say about us. If we don’t, we’ll end up becoming something that we are not and avoid seeing the things that help define who we are. No human is perfect and we're all amalgamations of the same thoughts feelings and emotions, so whether we choose to identify our own spectrum is our choice and no one else's.
