HOTTEA

HOTTEA is a Minneapolis based artist whose practice bridges the radical history of graffiti writing with a contemporary language rooted in tenderness, memory, and public space. Over the past decade, he has become known for transforming fences, bridges, and architectural structures into woven fields of line and color, yet his work begins long before the yarn, in the quiet study of trains, movement, and coded language.

Raised across the street from a rail line, where trains passed three to five times per day, the artist’s formative years unfolded in front of a traveling gallery. In the early 1990s, writers such as NACE, MONK, MENIS, DRONE, SLEJ, and EWOK had turned freight trains into moving canvases that carried regional styles across the country. Studying these works as they passed his home each day, HOTTEA developed an intuitive sense of form and rhythm long before entering an art program. Pilgrimages to Minneapolis and Saint Paul and early issues of Life Sucks Die from Minneapolis and Volume One from Kansas City deepened his understanding of the lineage he was absorbing, connecting regional practice to the deeper philosophies of writing culture, including the understanding of language as a form of resistance.

Before becoming known as HOTTEA, the artist entered the graffiti community as a writer, developing alongside SHOCK UC MSK. The urgency and risk of those early years, the hidden spaces, the coded communication, and the shifting boundary between visibility and consequence shaped the discipline that continues to anchor his work. A police chase and arrest during this time became a turning point. Confronted with his family through a Plexiglas window, he made a quiet and decisive shift toward a form of expression that could honor the language of writing without returning to the harm and vulnerability of that life.

As a Mexican American and LGBTQ artist, HOTTEA began searching for a form that could hold identity, history, and public engagement without erasure. During his studies at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, he identified with movements such as Dada and Surrealism, each shaped by artists responding to political rupture and migration through acts of creative defiance. He recognized affinities between these early avant gardes and the foundations of graffiti, and this connection shaped the conceptual core of his emerging practice.

The name HOTTEA came from an unexpected moment. A laminated restaurant menu, his mother’s order of cornbread and hot tea, and the sense of warmth and belonging it carried offered a new direction, a way to merge personal history with public work and to transform the energy of rebellion into gestures of care.

His yarn installations, which have become a signature of his practice, transform everyday structures into grids that hold color, movement, and community. These works are accessible by design, with no specialized knowledge required to enter them. Their softness carries its own defiance, using humble material to shift how we move through space. Like the minimal lines of Fred Sandback, they rely on clarity and restraint, a single line that changes everything it touches. As they fade with weather and time, they leave traces that become part of the environment’s memory.

Across public installations and now drawings and limited editions, HOTTEA’s work continues to explore how art can create openings rather than boundaries, how a single line can shift perception, and how tenderness can operate as a form of resistance. His work is included in museum, corporate, and private collections internationally, yet remains grounded in the values formed during his earliest encounters with the freight trains outside his childhood home.

- Joe Ellis