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David Antonio de la Cruz

David Antonio de la Cruz is versatile artist who uses a diverse range of media such as painting, drawing, and video. He is known for pushing the limits of his figure paintings by adding personal objects in the form of collage that represent him as an individual. He has been shown in multiple exhibitions, including at Franklin Furnace and Bronx Museum of Arts, and has been awarded several fellowships.

Early Life and Education
David Antonio de la Cruz is a Puerto Rican artist who  was born in the Philadelphia in 1974. After growing up in Philadelphia, at the age of twenty, de la Cruz moved to Brooklyn, New York City in order to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at Pratt Institute. He later earned an Masters of Fine Art from Yale University. De la Cruz attended Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture and the AIM program at the Bronx Museum in 2006. He is a recipient of a 2013 Franklin Furnace Fund Award and the Urban Artist Initiative Award in 2011. His work not only pushes the limits of the artistic media but also attempts to approach the concept of migration into his pieces. De la 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. In 2015-16, he was resident artist at the LMCC Workspace Residency Program. He is also developing an extension to the Opera performance, as well as preparing to film his next project in Ireland. The artist lives and works in New York City.

De la Cruz was brought up in a very traditional Puerto Rican household. On the mainland he was considered a Puerto Rican, and his own family on the island considers them also from out there. His identity here was never contested by anybody. David was considered and talked about as a “foreign” artist. David's mother found out, and was personally offended. It totally took him by surprise, David expresses felted robbed of his identity and lost for a second time. "There was no natural space where that I belonged uncontested or a home to go back to". "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."

Work and Themes
De la Cruz's work not only pushes the limits of the artistic media but also attempts to approach the concept of migration into his pieces. 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. He is currently working as a  resident artist in the LMCC Workspace Residency Program. He is also developing an extension to the Opera performance, as well as preparing to film his next project in Ireland.

In his practice, he fuses video, costume construction, performance and painting to explore and redefine queerness, diasporic, psychological and ever-shifting unnamed spaces. His paintings have been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum, Jersey City Museum, Museo de Puerto Rico and various galleries. He has shown most recently at Lehmann Maupin, the Islip Museum of Art, Momenta Art, and Performa 13. He was the 2015 Resident at Gateway Project Spaces. 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. Last year he was commission by El Museo Del Barrio with additional funds from 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 and a jazz singer, a small orchestra, the artists Elia Alba and Mickalene Thomas on stage. The work, like the artist, is intense, and you can feel the drama jump at you. He introduced his work to the Opera performers by saying, “I am a bit of a drama queen and I’m not apologizing for it.” 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. A second commission by Longwood Gallery to re-stage the performance, The Piano Piece, followed up this project.

Over the summer of 2014 his paintings were included in yearlong exhibition, Portraiture Now: Staging The Self, at The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. His work has been reviewed many times in The New York Times, Time Out New York, Wall Street Journal, Journal USA, Studio Magazine, Arc Magazine, Bomb Magazine and El Centro Journal.

Antonio de la Cruz uses painting, video, sculpture, and costume-making to map out a queer, diasporic experience, usually a narrative suppressed by that of Puerto Rican migration. He writes, “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.”

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. He reinterprets “invisible histories” those of a migrating people and the queer body.

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. That didn’t change much all through high school. I never considered doing anything else."

Exhibitions and Awards
2014 LMCC Workspace. New York, NY.

2013 Franklin Furnace. New York, NY.

2011 Urban Artist Initiative Award. New York, NY.

2009 Yale Summer School of Art at Norfolk Fellowship Award, Norfolk, CT.

2006 Skowhegan School of Painting/Sculpture Fellowship Grant Award, Madison, ME.

2006 Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY