Nonahood News: The last time you were featured in Nonahood News was in 2023. How has your journey evolved since then?
Juan Pablo Santa Luna: Well, my journey has been very challenging. At that time, I was working as a philanthropist and cultural ambassador for the Orlando Philharmonic. So my job was to promote music and bring in donations. I was really focused on just that. Now, a couple of years later, I am no longer with the Orlando Philharmonic and I am the executive director of Mills Gallery, which is an art gallery but it’s more than an art gallery, it’s more like a cultural hub where arts converge, you know, just to create new experiences. So my journey has evolved a lot. I think that I’m growing day by day. You never just stop growing if you think about your goals and about what you want in life. So, it’s constantly growing in your mind. But, my goals are still in the position of wanting to help the Hispanic community here in Orlando.
NHN: What are some of your latest accomplishments as an artist or as a prominent member in the community?
JPSL: I had my first solo exhibition, which was a success in terms of attendance and sales. We had two sales, but how people engaged with my art was amazing. But I decided that I had the potential to teach what I learned in my journey. I decided to join forces with Boris Garbe, and I became a partner in the business of art. Where I am now, Mills Art Gallery, we developed it into a business because art is a business. Sometimes as artists, we don’t know how to sell ourselves. I decided just to turn a little bit of my goal into helping other artists, and that’s what we do here. We offer consulting for artists; we guide them how to sell themselves, how to appreciate and give some meaning to the pieces of art that they created. Sometimes they create the art and they don’t know what it means, you know, so we try to dig deeper. We sell art from the experiences and from the stories of the artist and that piece instead of just the technique and the color, which are also important. We are a nonprofit. So, we decided to move from LLC to nonprofit because we found out that the community really needs more of this. We bring events here at our gallery from Orlando Philharmonic, Orlando Opera, Ballet, and Orlando City. That’s what we like is unconventional partnerships, collaborations, events just to bring that experience to create a conversation around art. We have a lot of politicians that come here, not to talk about politics but to talk about art and about culture and about how we can just move the progress forward.
NHN: Were there any challenges you faced in shifting from corporate life to a creative and community-focused career?
JPSL: There were a lot of challenges, but the most important one was happening in my mind. I had a successful corporate career. I achieved what probably most people want to achieve here like the American dream, the salary and the house. But, inside I was empty. With that, you just have to decide on your own, you cannot count on advice from your best friend, your wife, your mother – it’s just you and yourself confronting you in the mirror. Obviously, you have to deal with what people tell you, like not to give up everything that you’ve built. The big challenge is to follow the voice you know and not self sabotage.
NHN: You often use upcycled materials in your art. What draws you to this method, and what kind of message do you hope it conveys?
JPSL: Upcycling materials is really cool. Upcycling is like when you take one object and you put it next to another object into a context you know and you create all this storytelling, so that’s why I use a lot of upcycled materials in my art. One example – I reuse picture frames. So, I would go get some frames from a secondhand shop, and I just redo the whole thing. I don’t know how much I’ve helped by doing this type of thing, but in my mind it’s like, okay, I’m doing something positive for the planet. The whole concept of creating something cool and meaningful out of something that before had a different purpose. It’s like giving a second chance to that object to do something cool. I just like it and I went with it.
NHN: Walk me through a day in your life.
JPSL: I wake up between 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. So, it’s not normally around 5:45 a.m that I get up and do a little exercise, and I sit down and I start writing my thoughts and organizing my day. I mean, I organize my day one day before but I just start working on my day. I like meditating. I take 10 minutes just to try to get into that mood of creation. I leave home around 9 a.m. to get to the gallery and work on the transition from LLC to nonprofit. We are in the process of hosting one of our most important art exhibitions coming up, so it takes about three months in advance to organize a really successful solo exhibition. That’s what I do on a normal day. I like writing about my day at the end because in the future I know that I’m going to need to refer back to what I wrote that day in order to get unstuck from a situation. I like journaling; I’ve been journaling probably for 20 years. So, I have my journals where I go back to see what Juan Pablo Santa Luna at that time was thinking and see how we can connect the dots from past and present. I have daily meetings with community leaders from arts from culture, and with business owners from the city. I like connecting with elected officials from the city, you know, because they are the decision makers and have the power to change things here.
NHN: What are some of your dream projects or are there any artists you wish to collaborate with?
JPSL: I think that a project I would like to lead is a project in the city where we can build a cultural hub, like a technological cultural hub. We can have art galleries, stages for performances, shops to buy things and where we can have an AI center where you can learn. So, for the Hispanic communities, we bring the 21 nationalities that we have here from the Hispanic side in one place, and we learn from each other while unifying the American community, which is the most important thing. That’s probably something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and I think that we need from the Hispanic community, a place to gather and we can show that we are not just what people think the Hispanic community is. We have great people and great leaders. I think that’s a long-term goal, but for now I like talking to people and being able to help them, especially young generations that come here to the gallery to talk and I have the chance to guide them. That’s something that I achieve daily.
NHN: You mentioned wanting to make “disruptive, relevant changes” in Orlando by 2033. Can you expand on what that looks like?
JPSL: Well, it looks very promising and the actions that I have to take can’t come from just myself. I have to get a group of people together to achieve that goal. Now that we are a nonprofit organization, I think that we have a base here for people to support what we are doing, and I think that’s a big step from two years ago when I first talked about this when I had nothing. I would talk to people and they would ask how I’m going to do it and would tell me to follow the steps. Now, I found out the right steps that work in my life and I applied them to this goal, and it’s kind of working. I’m meeting with important people that I never would have imagined like mayors and city council members. Maxwell Alejandro is a politician from Democratic Party. He gave me an award for the work that I was doing with the Hispanic community. So, he recognized me as a Hispanic leader, which is a great achievement. You know, two years ago, I never imagined this, it was just based on a dream but now it’s more like a practical dream. After that, it gave me the confidence to say I know I can do this in this time, and it’s about who you connect with and how you network yourself, which is not something that they teach us in school. You have to develop how to treat people, how to communicate and how you apply that in life. It’s about connecting with the right people who have the money and the power to say, “Okay, this guy has something here. He wants to do something for the Hispanic community.” And that would be an amazing lift up, but I have been proving to myself that I can do it.
NHN: You’ve said “If not now, when?” What does that phrase mean to you in your current journey
JPSL: That’s something that got stuck in my mind one day that came to me when I was trying to fix a situation in my life. I needed an answer, and I was confused. And a little kid, I would say six years old, came to me at a party with my family and he told me that in Spanish. So I say, “If not now, when?” when I needed to make a decision and I was postponed, procrastinating, just waiting for the perfect time. I use it in my daily life when I talk to people and they are hesitating, and I think that is like something like a punch. For example, if you say, “I don’t know if I should use that perfume today because it’s too expensive.” But, if not now, when? When I have people that come here and they need to make a decision – I just tell my story and say listen this is what happened and you have to do it now because I mean there’s no better time than now.
NHN: For those who want to get involved, what are the most impactful ways they can support your mission?
JPSL: If it’s an artist who wants to get involved in what we are creating here, it’s just a matter of approaching the gallery or they can approach me or Boris Garbe, who is my business partner, and just ask for an appointment to come talk with us. I get help when I help others; it’s like you help others, and at the same time you are helping yourself. On the other hand, if somebody wants to help us financially and if that person believes in our projects, we have several projects where we sponsor artists. In history, there used to be sponsors of the arts like Michelangelo and Davinci, who were all sponsored. I have already had probably four cases of success where I match or I partner up a sponsor with an artist in development. I like working with emerging artists because they are very ambitious and know that they can make it. So we sponsor the whole collection for the solo exhibition. We pay the artists also. It’s a model that is a win-win for the artist, for the gallery and for the donor because sometimes the donor wants exposure and they want to help. If somebody wants to help, just reach out to us and ask questions and we can find out how we can help.
