Pedro Morales Biography

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Pedro Morales was born in the wide horizons of Los Angeles in 1963, but it was the border light of South Texas that ultimately shaped his eye. Trained first as an architect—earning his B.Arch. in Arlington and later an M.Arch. at SCI‑Arc, where studios stretched from downtown L.A. to the shores of Lake Lugano—Pedro learned to think of space as both shelter and story. A summer inside Frank O. Gehry’s buzzing office confirmed that buildings could bend, flare, even laugh.

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In 1997 he drove south, traded freeways for mesquite scrub, and opened Antares Architecture Studio in Laredo. For the next decade he sketched homes and storefronts that pulled the brutal heat into high clerestories and coaxed shade out of raw steel. In the evenings, that same desert palette crept onto canvas: copper sheets left to rust into fiery oranges, aerial photographs re‑imagining border towns as floating grids, oil paintings that mapped the storm‑fronts of the mind.

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A residency with the legendary Michael Tracy in San Ygnacio deepened the dialogue between land, body, and myth. The resulting solo exhibition, Circles of Light and the Cloudless Blue Sky (2019), felt less like a gallery show and more like stepping into a weather system—one where oxidized metal, pigment, and prayer flags all shared the same thermal currents.

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Pedro’s practice has always braided making with caretaking. In 2020 he joined the board of the Laredo Center for the Arts and, with fellow artists, launched the Art Acquisition Project to champion voices from the borderlands of South Texas and Northern Mexico. Parallel to his studio life runs a steady current of contemplative study: month‑long retreats in the Rockies, pilgrimages across Asia, and in 2016 a six‑month solitary retreat in Valle de Bravo that clarified the quiet architecture of breath and awareness.

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Today, whether drafting a house, photographing an imagined city, or sitting in stillness, Pedro Morales works with one abiding question: how much space does a single line—or a single moment—need in order to come alive?