La Cholla Jackson receives Monte Azul Fellowship Award
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We happily announce La Cholla Jackson as recipient of a Monte Azul Achievement Fellowship Award, funded by patron visitors to Monte Azul.
La Cholla Jackson
Also known as the Patron’s Fellowship award, this prestigious award is an innovative Monte Azul initiative which allows a visitors’ stay at our spectacular property to help underwrite residencies at Monte Azul. Artists who reside in Costa Rica are selected by an anonymous committee of peers and invited to attend a residency at no cost to the artist. (Read more about it here)
Monte Azul Fellowship Awardee Pablo A. Quirós (1989, San José, Costa Rica), better known as La Cholla Jackson, worked in our studios while preparing for Cholla’s Herd I: Conatus Audax at MADC (Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo), curated by Carola Fumero, and ECLIPSE: Nuevo Arte de Centroamérica y sus Diásporas at the Museo de Arte de El Salvador (MARTE).
About the Artist
Trained in graphic design, Quirós introduced the artistic persona La Cholla Jackson around 2015 through The House of Weisas, alongside La Chiquiatrica and La Miley Garza. Calling themselves trashbestias, the collective used happenings, performance, travestismo, humor, pleasure, tenderness and transgression to challenge Costa Rica’s conservative culture.
Transforming trash simultaneously into glamour as well as political defiance, La Cholla’s work also addresses the condition of the so-called “Third World”: countries whose wealth is extracted to benefit the “First World,” which then dumps its refuse back onto their lands, reminders of the wastefulness of their exploitation.
Local vernacular further shifts the discourse from a “First World” context and places a
specifically Costa Rican (“Third World”) reference system as the ultimate definer of relevance.
As philosopher Sebastián Alonso Coto Murillo explains in ArteInformado, the name La Cholla Jackson combines two cultural registers. In rural Costa Rican speech, chollar can mean stripping coffee branches by hand, while andar chollado describes scraped or raw skin.
“Cholla” evokes labor, injury and a body stripped of its protective surface.
“Jackson” connects to Afro-Costa Rican and African American culture, and to the circulation of US music, fashion and celebrity in Costa Rica.
The result is a persona between worlds: local and transnational, rural and pop, wounded and glamorous, vulnerable but defiant.
La Cholla transforms what dominant culture leaves chollado and weiso—the damaged, awkward, excluded and discarded—into presence, imagination, and power.
A trashbestia is not simply what society throws away. It survives and mutates, it performs—and looks back in defiance.
Lives and works in San José, Costa Rica.
Photos courtesy of the artist
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