Tony Santoyo is a Mexican-American artist who blends storytelling with clay. Inspired by his Mexican culture and traditional crafts, his hand-built work explores form, function, and personal narrative through themes of migration, identity, belonging, and hospitality. Each object carries memory, personality, and emotion, creating moments of connection.
The prickly pear, native to Mexico and the Southwest, serves as his central metaphor for resilience and for blooming in difficult conditions. Its thorns, blossoms, and fruit reflect the tension between vulnerability and protection, and the complexity of personal and cultural identity.
Through hand-building, mark-making, and textured surfaces, Tony preserves the evidence of touch and process, letting imperfections become part of the story. Living between function and sculpture, his work celebrates everyday rituals and the spaces of welcome and gathering that objects can create.
Bio
Tony holds a BA in Studio Arts from the University of Minnesota and completed a fellowship at the Penland School of Craft, where he deepened his commitment to ceramics as a medium of storytelling and identity. Currently residing in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, where he lived since he was a year old. Tony has been shown at Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville, Northern Clay Center's NCECA exhibition, Gamut Gallery in Minneapolis, and Penland Gallery, among others. He is a 2023 Windgate Individual Artist Grant recipient and in 2026 he taught a workshop and attended Pentaculum residencey at Arrowmount School of Craft.