Daniel Monteavaro

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

Moncho 1929 is the studio name of Dan Monteavaro, a Puerto Rican-American painter and muralist based in Los Angeles. His paintings and murals investigate how identity is worn, concealed, and transformed — through botanical forms, ceremonial masks, and the geometric structures that hold cultures together across migration and time. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas and wood panel, Monteavaro builds surfaces where lush, almost overgrown imagery meets the precision of decorative pattern. His Masks Series draws on Afro-Caribbean and Mesoamerican visual traditions to explore the face as a site of spiritual negotiation — simultaneously protection, performance, and revelation. The Botanica Series reads flora as a form of cultural persistence: the plants that cross borders, that refuse erasure, that keep flowering in unlikely places. Across both bodies of work, geometry provides structure — not as constraint but as inherited language, a visual grammar passed through generations. Whether intimate or monumental, the work asks the same question: what does a person carry forward when the culture around them is always in flux? Monteavaro's work exists at multiple scales simultaneously. Studio paintings in small and large format occupy the same conceptual territory as his public murals for the City of West Hollywood, Magic Johnson Park, the city of Los Angeles, and MLS/Audi Field. His work is held in permanent collections including the Figge Art Museum, Google, Paramount...

Artwork