Michael Mancilla lives in two temperatures. One is literal—three degrees, Chicago cold that makes your eyelashes rethink their life choices. The other is internal—the heat of memory, lineage, and pride that doesn’t clock out when the job is done. By day, he installs security cameras across Chicago, the kind of work that demands ladders, numb fingers, and a refusal to negotiate with the weather. By night, he creates five-foot-tall black-and-white paintings of vaqueros—men on horseback, carved in light and shadow, mid-motion, mid-purpose, mid-truth.
I spoke to Michael while he was outside, installing cameras in 3° weather. The streets were empty. Of course they were. I told him he might be the only person willing to work in that cold. Either something’s loose upstairs, I said, or he’s dedicated to getting it done at all costs—frostbite be damned.
His answer came easy: “A little of both.”
That tracks.
Michael grew up on the South Side and in Pilsen, Chicago neighborhoods that don’t romanticize work—they require it. Today, he’s an installer and co-owner of 606Installs, securing homes and businesses while most of the city stays inside. His company site is simple and direct, like the man himself: 606installs.com. No fluff. Just function.
The paintings, though? That’s where the soul shows up.
His vaqueros are not decorative. They don’t perform. They stand, ride, labor. Rendered in stark black and white, they feel carved out of effort itself—broad strokes that suggest muscle memory, hats tilted with quiet authority, horses caught between motion and restraint. These works come from Michael’s trips to Mexico, where he met family members he hadn’t known and friends who welcomed him like blood. There, he didn’t just observe the vaquero life—he was allowed to experience it. To understand what it means to be both vaquero and caballero: responsibility without spectacle, strength without announcement.
And here’s the part that makes people uncomfortable—which usually means it’s true.
Not everyone can own a Michael Mancilla painting.
These works are not for people who see Mexicans or Mexican-Americans as “others,” as side characters in the American story. If you deny that this work ethic—this endurance, this pride, this labor—is the American experience, you don’t get to hang one of these on your wall. Period.
You don’t buy these paintings.
You earn them.
Because they represent something specific and unpolished: the soul of Mexican and Mexican-American work ethic. The kind that shows up in three-degree weather. The kind that builds, installs, protects, and then goes home to create something lasting with frozen hands and a full heart.
Michael Mancilla doesn’t separate who he is. The installer and the artist are the same man. One secures the present. The other remembers the past and insists on dignity.
Some people collect art to impress guests.
Others collect it because it tells the truth.
Michael’s work does the latter—and it doesn’t ask for permission.
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