DAVID RIOS FERREIRA
David Rios Ferreira was born in Bronx, NY and currently lives and works in Jersey City and New York City. In his mixed media drawings and sculptures, 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 race, nation, sexuality, and gender. Familiar cartoon characters are deconstructed and reinterpreted to become temporal beings and transmitters of imagined 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 received a B.F.A. at The Cooper Union. He has exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including Seattle, WA and Berlin, Germany, and has had solo exhibitions at Rush Arts Corridor Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY) and the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, (Brattleboro, VT). He has held residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York, NY) and The Center for Book Arts (New York, NY). Rios Ferreira 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 a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, a National Association of Latino Arts & Culture Fund for the Arts grant and the ArtSlant Grand Prize.
