David Antonio Cruz

David Antonio Cruz received a BFA from Pratt Institute in New York, an MFA from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhagen, Maine. Select exhibitions include “Else” at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York (2010), “Paradise” at the Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia (2010), “Between the air, the bark and the green” a solo show at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos at Hunter College in New York (2008), “Tropicalisms” at the Jersey City Museum in New Jersey (2006), “Artist in the Marketplace” at the Bronx Museum in New York (2006) and “The (S) Files” at El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2005). Select awards include the Urban Artist Initiative Award for 2009-2010, the Yale Summer School of Art at Norfolk Fellowship Award and the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts Award. David Antonio Cruz lives and works in Brooklyn.

A queer, unnamed, and diasporic space filled with shape-shifters, travelers, and performers is the realm where David Antonio Cruz’s work subsists. In many ways his upbringing set the stage for his artistic investigation of the interstitial and undefined spaces as he navigates between fixed points and undefined realms. In the thick of a lush dream forest, a noisy traffic-filled street, or the cold sterility of a vacant interior the characters in Cruz’s work begin their performances, activating these worlds with a strange brew of love, frustration, multiplicity, fantasy, memory, and madness. Cruz is interested in mapping out these constantly shifting psychological spaces of transformation between the real and the imagined, the flowers and the garbage, the grit and the grotesque, where physicality is erased and broken down.
 

For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art