MSU alum honored with Artista Latino Award at ArtPrize

MSU alum Gustavo Uriel Ayala received the Artista Latino Award at this year’s ArtPrize for his installation, titled “Masking Tears With Sweat.” The Artista Latino Award is a community award that recognizes and celebrates outstanding works of art by Latin American and Hispanic artists participating in ArtPrize, an international art competition and cultural festival held annually in Grand Rapids.

Ayala is an artist and educator who earned a master's degree in studio art from the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University. He recently worked as the gallery preparator at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University where he taught classes in painting, drawing, and color and design.

As an artist, Ayala uses wrestling as a framework to grapple with the legacy of masculine competition and its continued veneration as an ideal of masculinity. Drawing from his experiences as a closeted, gay and Mexican immigrant in the Midwest, his vibrant paintings explore the intersections between masculinity and marginalized identities through visibility.

“Wrestling exhibits nonstop bodily contact, which is in stark contrast to the limitations that frequently regulate touch between men. I associate the wrestler with vulnerability due to the compromising physicality they endure: faces pressed, limbs tangled, an overbearing pressure of another’s body on top of one’s own,” Ayala wrote in his ArtPrize artist statement. “The sport is one of few contexts in which men and boys are free to exhibit weakness, and I am captivated by the tenderness evoked by their embrace. Alongside the struggle depicted by these images, they may also be read as moments of fear, sadness, or compassion. These more sensitive traits run contrary to the characteristics assigned to masculinity: strength, control, and power. The figures in my works exist in an arena of longing where they desire to be free from this rigid conformity.”

This year, Ayala’s work also was part of the Michigan Pride Juried Exhibition at (SCENE) Metrospace in East Lansing, and his solo show, “The Arena of Longing,” exhibited at Central Michigan University from March 19 to July 9, 2026.

During ArtPrize 2026, which ran Sept. 18-Oct. 3, Ayala’s “Masking Tears With Sweat” installation was displayed at Cūra Gallery, a temporary pop-up exhibition space curated by the ArtPrize Exhibitions Team.

Each year, ArtPrize welcomes more than 900,000 visitors to the city of Grand Rapids to experience work by thousands of artists from around the world.