Why Studio Lenca is in the Design 100

José Campos works under the name Studio Lenca, turning his own displacement into paintings of high colour and evident warmth. Born in La Paz, El Salvador, in 1986, he crossed into the United States with his mother during the country’s civil war, before eventually settling in Britain, where he became a citizen in 2007. That journey runs through everything he makes since: portraits of his community in hats and vibrant dress, and sculpture built from blankets, paper and found materials.

Much of that work is collaborative rather than solitary. Chisme, the life-size wooden figures made with Latino immigrant workers, entered the Parrish Art Museum’s collection in 2023, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami has acquired his work too. Now based in Margate, Campos has built a practice, spanning painting, sculpture and textile, that treats migration and diasporic identity with real scale and craft, which is exactly what the Design 100 is built to recognise.