About

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1996, Luna, is a self-taught artist currently based in Los Angeles, California. After immigrating to the United States at the age of ten, Luna moved frequently before settling in Yakima, Washington, where they spent their formative years. Initially pursuing culinary arts, Luna later transitioned into graphic design. Freelance work in the field gradually led them toward visual storytelling and, ultimately, oil painting. He began pursuing painting professionally in 2021.

In recent years, Luna’s work has been exhibited at venues including Avenue 50 Studio, Plaza de La Raza, Industry One Foundation, and Rod Briggs Gallery. In 2025, he received an Honorable Mention from the Hopper Prize Spring Annual Grant and was selected as a finalist for a solo exhibition with Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA.

In 2026, Luna Licea was awarded and completed a summer residency with Open Air / Rocky Mountain Gardens, culminating in an exhibition of his work at Brunswick Gallery in Missoula, Mt.

Statement

Through a slow, playful and carefully planned process Luna’s work explores history, politics, Indigenous values, and personal memory using oil painting, and most recently wooden frames to craft a visual language which explores environments that question the systems shaping contemporary life while envisioning alternative ways of living grounded in community, cultural memory, and care.

Drawing from Indigenous understandings of interconnectedness, his work challenges values that prioritize capital over people, individuality over community, and consumption over care and innovation. His imagined worlds center relationships between people, culture, and the land, creating spaces where cooperation and collective experience become forms of resistance.

Faceless characters serve as a deliberate rejection of individualism and ego, shifting attention toward the collective. Their brightly colored clothing draws from pre-Hispanic traditions, his Jalisco heritage, contemporary life and the forms and colors of the natural world. Clothing becomes a vehicle for cultural memory and identity that acts as armor.

Ultimately, Lunas work uses world-building as a way to imagine futures beyond isolation, disposability, and exploitation—futures where interconnectedness and community are not ideals, but foundations for how we live and move through even the smallest parts of our life’s.