Photo: Jess Camacho

When BFA candidate Vinicius Sanchez  was eight years old, his family left their home in Brazil and made their way to south Florida. He learned English at school, spoke Portuguese at home, and struggled to find a comfortable balance between different cultures. “I felt isolated a lot as a kid,” he says. “I lived in a stereotype that people thought of as Latin, but I didn’t fit into the Latin world or the American world.”

Two things provided respite: art and stories. Sanchez made drawings and sewed them into books; he carved wood and sculpted with clay. And he read. As a child he’d heard old Brazilian folktales about pink dolphins, headless mules, and one-legged boys, and he followed these with the fables of Jean La Fontaine, “The Metamorphosis” by Kafka—“pretty sad for a 10-year-old,” he admits—and lots of comic books. “Godzilla was kind of a hero to me,” Sanchez says. “He was a creature rejected by society and I identified with that.”

After graduating from an arts-centered magnet high school in West Palm Beach, Sanchez arrived at the Museum School last fall and has relished the opened-minded environment he found. “There are so many different kinds of artists, and we share ideas very well,” he says. “There are lots of areas to explore. It’s easy to get new ideas for work.” Sanchez began his studies with printmaking, and his etchings are full of surreal, fanciful animals that evoke the moral fables of his childhood: plucked chickens in high heels personify fashion models (“all that is valued is their meat, or body”); pigs holding out their forelegs to human beggars represent the seductive power of money. “Our social background, our make-up as people, seems so animalistic,” Sanchez says. “I like the idea of looking at legends and retelling them in a new way.”

By layering his folklore-like images over modern social dilemmas, Sanchez is, in a way, restructuring his culture, integrating his two backgrounds instead of keeping them separate. “I look at my life like it’s a story,” he says. “That’s what culture is, a story being played out.”