David Rios Ferreira

About

American b. 1982  —  In David Rios Ferreira’s drawings, sculptures and installations, appropriated images from coloring books and animation, 18th-century newspaper etchings, and political cartoons from the 1900s coalesce into a study on identity formation—an investigation of gender, sexuality, race and nation. Familiar cartoon characters are deconstructed and reinterpreted to become temporal beings and repositories for personal and political histories. These beings, and the space they inhabit furnish an in-between reality—a reality that signals how the body both bears and transforms historical memory. 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 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, a National Association of Latino Arts & Culture Fund for the Arts grant 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, BRIC (Brooklyn, NY). David Rios Ferreira lives and works in New York and Jersey City, and holds a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union.