BIO
David Rios Ferreira has exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including CoCA (Seattle, WA), Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN) and Kunstraum Richard Sorge Gallery (Berlin, Germany). He has held residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York, NY), The Center for Book Arts (New York, NY) and has participated in professional development programs such as Emerge 11 at Aljira (Newark, NJ) and the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program (Bronx, NY). Awards include the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture Fund for the Arts grant, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, and the ArtSlant Grand Prize. Group exhibitions include Bronx Calling: The Fourth AIM Biennial, The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY), Uproot at Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), and Figuring The Floral at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY). Solo exhibitions include And by each crime and every kindness, Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill, Ni de aquí, Ni de allá at Rush Arts, Corridor Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), And I Hear Your Words That I Made Up, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (Vermont) and most recently Don't you see I got everythin you need, at BRIC (Brooklyn, NY). David Rios Ferreira lives and works in New York and Jersey City, and holds a BFA from The Cooper Union.
ARTIST STATEMENT
David Rios Ferreira merges historical etchings, 1930s political cartoons, and children’s coloring books to produce eerily alluring abstract drawings, sculptures, and installations. Clusters of lines and layers of color dominate space creating dense hybrid forms. Familiar characters like Astro Boy, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan are deconstructed and reconstituted to become temporal beings and repositories for personal and political histories.
This meditation on the past stems from Ferreira’s family history and his identity as a mainland Puerto Rican. He is heavily influenced by the deculturalization practices conducted by the U.S. on children in Puerto Rico up until the 1950s—strategies his parents remember as nursery rhymes and school pledges. Ferreira’s practice is also informed by behavior exhibited by his nephews on the Autism Spectrum—of borrowing lines from cartoons in order to communicate. Their interest in animated films goes beyond childish obsession and becomes their source for language.
As his nephews remix existing material to navigate their world, Ferreira is drawn to comparable practices in carnival costumes and masks found in the Caribbean and West Africa. New identities are constructed from recycled fragments. Everyday objects become ingredients for structures of power, spiritual tradition, and tools for addressing social and political issues.
These different, yet structurally aligned practices serve as inspiration for Ferreira’s work. Coloring books and animation, historical references, and other appropriated images are his “found objects.” The tension between these objects, their meaning, and what they are imbued with by being forced together coalesce into a study on identity formation—an investigation of gender, sexuality, race, and nation.
