Morales has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Arts Council, Fellows for Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Fleishhacker Foundation, New Langton Arts and the Creative Work Fund. He is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied in the New Genres department. His work has been exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Fototeca de Havana in Cuba, Peres Projects in Los Angeles and the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte Roma in Mexico City. Group shows include the San Juan Triennial in Puerto Rico, Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York City and Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany. His work has also been shown in the 2006 Singapore Biennale and the Tenth Annual Istanbul Biennale 2007 and currently on view at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art with upcoming exhibitions at The Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City and The 2008 California Biennale at The Orange County Museum.
Morales' curatorial projects include the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Southern Exposure and the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art, among many others. Morales is founder and co-curator for Queens Nails Annex, an artist-run project space in San Francisco. He also is the adjunct curator at Yerba Buena Center for The Arts.