​Contemporary South African Art

Joseph M. Sánchez is an American artist from Trinidad, Colorado, by way of the White Mountain Apache Reservation and Taos Pueblo. A leader in Indigenous and Chicano arts since the 1970s, Joseph has worked with hundreds of artists creating work, developing exhibitions, and advocating for the rights of minority artists, most importantly with the Professional Native Indian Artists (Native Group of Seven). A spiritual surrealist, Joseph's work is sensual and dreamlike, provocative and thought-inducing. Still producing work, and exhibiting across the United States and Canada, Joseph M Sánchez is simultaneously a community elder, and an instigator at the front lines of the battle for the creation of art and how we define it as a culture.

Born in Trinidad, Colorado to Pueblo, Spanish, and German parents, Joseph Marcus Sánchez was raised in Whiteriver, Arizona on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. In 1966, he graduated from Alchesay High School in Whiteriver, with the intent to join the priesthood. This was not the right fit, and he returned home to the White Mountains. Sadly, his mother became ill and died unexpectedly. Soon after, in 1968 he joined the United States Marine Corps and was stationed at the El Toro UCMC Base in California, where he trained soldiers drafted for the Vietnam War.

In 1970, He travelled to Canada, where he met Ann Nadine Krajeck, a young photographer. They were married and settled in Richer, Manitoba, eventually purchasing a 20-acre farm in Giroux, Manitoba. In February 1975, Sanchez returned to the United States under President Gerald Ford's amnesty program. Ann stayed in Canada, and Joseph traveled back and forth until she joined him in Arizona in 1978.

In 1981, Joseph and Ann had a daughter, Rosa Nadine Xochimilco, and they lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Joseph maintained a studio on Cattletrack Road. During the 1980s, Sánchez developed a program as an artist in residence at Rosa's schools, teaching college level art history and technique to elementary school students. More than half of those students have gone on to become professional artists.

Sánchez travelled for his work, and in 1990 began traveling to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he met Margaret Burke. In 1996 he made his Santa Fe residence permanent, and they had a son, Jerome Bonafacio Xocotl. Joseph and Margaret were married in 2006.

https://www.josephmsanchez.com/about#bio

Sanchez lived in Canada from the early to mid 1970s, and was a founding member of the "Professional Native Indian Artists Association”, otherwise known as the Indian Group of Seven. In Winnipeg he met Daphne Odjig, who had opened up the Warehouse Gallery in the early 1970s (now the Wahsa Gallery and currently owned by Gary Scherbain, the Winnipeg Free Press Reporter who originally dubbed the PNIAA the "Indian Group of Seven").

Since Odjig was helping him out and working with him at the time, he became a member of the Professional Indian Native Artists' Association by association. He exhibited in group shows in Canada, Europe, and the United States.