David Antonio Cruz

Last updated
David Antonio Cruz
Born1974 (age 4849)
Education Yale University
Website DavidAntonioCruz.com

David Antonio Cruz (born 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, video, and performance. Cruz is best known for his psychological paintings that combine figuration, abstraction, and collage. [1] His work has been shown in a number of venues, including El Museo del Barrio, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and has been awarded several fellowships. [2] Cruz lives and works in New York City. [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Cruz is a Puerto Rican artist who was born in Philadelphia. At the age of nineteen, Cruz moved to Brooklyn, New York to attend Pratt Institute. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at Pratt in 1998. He went on to earn a Masters of Fine Art in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Cruz attended Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture and the AIM program at the Bronx Museum in 2006.

Cruz was brought up in a traditional Puerto Rican home. "Growing up, I was a very quiet boy, I kept to myself. I spent my time drawing, painting and making things. Paint was the most natural way I could really express myself. I didn't feel conformable speaking or writing." [4]

"As far I can remember, I don't think there was a moment that I didn't consider myself an artist. It's all I can remember. I remember in elementary school, I would spend my recess time in the art room. Once, I slipped out of class early to head to the art room and my home room teacher caught me. She gave me the ultimate punishment by making me go outside to play. It was terrifying! She knew me well." [4]

In Philadelphia and New York, his identity was never contested, but, during his first exhibit in Puerto Rico, David was talked about as a "foreign" artist. It totally took him by surprise. "I felt like I didn't belong here nor there." [4]

Career

Cruz not only pushes the limits of his artistic media, but also the ways artists can represent psychological spaces related to migration. Cruz's work represents the life of those migrating families that either left their homeland, stayed, or went back and are divided between two places. [5]

In his practice, he fuses video, fashion, performance, and painting to explore and redefine queerness, diasporic, psychological, and ever-shifting unnamed spaces. [6] His paintings have been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jersey City Museum, Museo de Puerto Rico, and various galleries. He has also shown at Lehmann Maupin, the Islip Art Museum, Momenta Art, and Performa 13. [7] He was the 2015 Resident at Gateway Project Spaces. [8] His films have been shown at the Big Screen Project, the Anthology Film Archives, Arte Americas, El Museo del Barrio, and various installations in Philadelphia, Chapel Hill, Los Angeles, and Miami.

Cruz was commissioned by El Museo del Barrio with support from the Franklin Furnace Fund to create The Opera. The project was presented as part of Performa 13, and it involved thirty performers, including ten actors, an opera singer, a jazz singer, and a small orchestra. The artists Elia Alba and Mickalene Thomas were also part of the performance. The work, like the artist, has an emotional intensity. Cruz has said, "I am a bit of a drama queen and I'm not apologizing for it." Sasha Dees, reviewing for ARC Magazine , said, "It's a lot to take in, at times confusing at first glance. Broken plates, hidden images behind thick dripping chocolate and white paint, fragile paper planes, chairs, period piece costumes, and splinters of glass in sparkling red high heel shoes are paired with screams, opera singing, and hysterical laughter. [4] [9] A second commission by the Bronx Council on the Arts to re-stage the performance, The Piano Piece (originally performed in 2008 at the Governor's School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia), for the Longwood Art Gallery followed up this project in 2014. [10]

Later that year, his paintings were included in a year-long exhibition, Portraiture Now: Staging The Self, at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

Cruz "use[s] painting, video, sculpture, and costume-making to map out a queer, diasporic experience", usually a narrative "that has been suppressed" when discussing "Puerto Rican migration". He wrote, "Through a variety of new and found materials, such as enamel, gold-leaf, china, constructed costumes and rags, I layer my paintings and build up their surfaces in an attempt to make visible the queer body, to dress it, and depict the space where it exists. Whether I layer sound over sound or cover a painted figure in chocolate paint, I use seduction to prompt the viewer to question and negotiate what is being offered while partially obscuring the familiar." [11]

The artist cites "the fantasy world of Dorothy's Oz and the politics of Maria's West Side Story" stating that "personal narratives, American and queer history events, classic films, and fashion" anchor his work. In addition, he also "reinterpret[s] invisible histories" those of "a migrating people and the queer body". [11]

His work has been reviewed many times in The New York Times , Time Out New York , The Wall Street Journal , Journal USA , The Studio , ARC Magazine, BOMB , and Centro Journal.

Exhibitions and awards

Sources

  1. "Staging the Self | National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution". npg.si.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-13.
  2. 1 2 "D A V I D A N T O N I O C R U Z". davidantoniocruz.com. Retrieved 2016-04-13.
  3. 1 2 "2015 RESIDENT: DAVID ANTONIO CRUZ". Gateway Project Spaces. Retrieved 2016-04-13.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Dees, Sasha (2014-03-17). "David Antonio Cruz – alwaysagoodtime". ARC Magazine . Retrieved 2020-07-23.
  5. "David Antonio Cruz". Artist Pension Trust. Retrieved 2016-04-13.
  6. "Antonio Cruz: The Return of the Dirty Boys".
  7. "David Antonio Cruz: alwaysagoodtime". Archived from the original on 2016-04-29.
  8. "Gateway Project Spaces: Resident David Cruz".
  9. "DAVID ANTONIO CRUZ TAKEABITE: THE OPERA".
  10. "Other (performances)".
  11. 1 2 "David Antonio Cruz: Artist Statement". National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian Institution . Retrieved 2020-07-23.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nuyorican movement</span> Cultural movement for Puerto Ricans living in or near New York City in the late 1960s / early 1970s

The Nuyorican movement is a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans. It originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in neighborhoods such as Loisaida, East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx as a means to validate Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">El Museo del Barrio</span> Museum in Manhattan, New York

El Museo del Barrio, often known simply as El Museo, is a museum at 1230 Fifth Avenue in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is located near the northern end of Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile, immediately north of the Museum of the City of New York. Founded in 1969, El Museo specializes in Latin American and Caribbean art, with an emphasis on works from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York City. It is the oldest museum of the country dedicated to Latino art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antonio Broccoli Porto</span> American painter

Antonio Broccoli Porto is an American artist, visual artist and sculptor.

Salomón Huerta is a painter based in Los Angeles, California who comes from Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in the Boyle Heights Projects in East Los Angeles. Huerta received a full scholarship to attend the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and completed his MFA at UCLA in 1998. Huerta gained critical acclaim and commercial attention in the late 1990s for his minimalist portraits of the backs of people's heads and color-saturated depictions of domestic urban architecture. He was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the US, Europe, and Latin America such as The Gagosian Gallery in London, England, and Studio La Città in Verona, Italy. Salomón Huerta is currently represented by Louise Alexander Gallery/There There in Los Angeles, California, and Porto Cervo, Italy.

Emilio Sanchez (1921–1999) was an American artist known for his architectural paintings and graphic lithographs. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, La Tertulia Museum, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Rafael Ferrer is a Puerto Rican artist. He was a 1993 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a 2011 recipient of an Annalee and Barnett Newman Foundation Grant. He is also a half-brother of actor José Ferrer and half-uncle of actor Miguel Ferrer.

Manny Vega is an American painter, illustrator, printmaker, muralist, mosaicist, and set and costume designer. His work portrays the history and traditions of the African Diaspora that exist in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Whitfield Lovell is a contemporary African-American artist who is known primarily for his drawings of African-American individuals from the first half of the 20th century. Lovell creates these drawings in pencil, oil stick, or charcoal on paper, wood, or directly on walls. In his most recent work, these drawings are paired with found objects that Lovell collects at flea markets and antique shops.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pepón Osorio</span> Puerto Rican artist

Pepón Osorio is a Puerto Rican artist. He uses different objects as well as video in his pieces to portray political and social issues in the Latino community. He was born in 1955 in Santurce, Puerto Rico and studied at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, Lehman College, and also Columbia University where he obtained his MA in sociology in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Villegas</span>

Jason Villegas is currently a San Francisco based contemporary artist. He has exhibited across the United States and internationally. Villegas' work utilizes a wide spectrum of mediums including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, textile, video and performance. He has created his own artistic realm and visual language in which to explore concepts such as globalism, evolution, sexuality, cosmology, and consumerism. Motifs in Villegas' artworks include fashion logos, animal hybrids, weaponry, sales banners, clothing piles, anuses, cosmic debris, taxidermy, bear men, amorphous beasts, religious iconography, and party scenarios.

Freddy Rodríguez was an American artist born in the Dominican Republic, who lived and worked in New York since 1963. Much of his work takes the form of large hard-edge geometric abstractions. His paintings have been widely exhibited and are held in several important collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Myrna Báez</span> Puerto Rican painter and printmaker (1931–2018)

Myrna Báez was a Puerto Rican painter and printmaker, considered one of the most important visual artists in Puerto Rico. She has been instrumental in promoting art and art education in her country. Her work has been shown and collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work has been characterized as confident and complex. She lived and worked in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Candida Alvarez</span> American painter

Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scherezade García</span> Visual artist

Scherezade García is a Dominican-born, American painter, printmaker, and installation artist. She is a co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA Collective. García is an Advisor to the Board of Directors of No Longer Empty and sits on the board of directors of the College Art Association (CAA) for the period of 2020–2024. She is assistant professor of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas and is represented by Praxis Art in New York, and Ibis Contemporary Art Gallery in New Orleans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz</span> American interdisciplinary artist

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, is an American interdisciplinary artist of Puerto Rican descent born in The Bronx, NY and based in Orlando, FL.

Sophie Rivera was an American artist and photographer of Puerto Rican-American descent. She was also an early member and instructor of En Foco, a not-for-profit organisation centred on contemporary fine art and photographers of diverse cultures. Rivera is best known for her 1978 photography series Nuyorican Portraits. Redefining Puerto Rican identity in the United States, the series included 50 black and white portraits taken in her home of Puerto Ricans in her neighbourhood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iliana emilia García</span> Visual artist

iliana emilia García is a Dominican-born, American visual artist and sculptor known for large-scale paintings and installations. She is a co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA (DYPG) Collective. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by ASR Contemporáneo.

Elle Pérez is an American photographer whose work explores gender identity, intimacy, vulnerability, and the relationship between seeing and love. Pérez is a gender non-conforming trans artist.

Perla de Leon, is an American artist and photographer from New York City. Her most famous work is her "South Bronx Spirit" photo series, documenting the urban decay of the South Bronx due to its total economic collapse during the 1970s.


Kenny Rivero is a Dominican-American visual artist who makes paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the complexity of identity through narrative images, collage and assemblage, language, and symbolism. Rivero is currently a Lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art and a Visiting Artist at The Cooper Union.