Register HERE for Gerardo Dexter Ciprian artist talk and film screening!
"Errant Ways: Diaspora, Belonging and Fugitivity as Practice"
"In my practice I continually ask myself: how is my work — on both a personal and communal level — sowing seeds that contribute to survival, to healing, to opening new circuits for engaging with a troubled world with a sense of wonder and curiosity?
I make objects, films and performances that emerge out of a practice that ritualizes remembrance as both an ode and a lament; a practice that feels vital to survival.
I unearth the ephemera of the Dominican diaspora — VHS recordings, archival footage, hand-me-down objects, oral histories and folklore — to distill an immigrant imaginary as a source of deep wisdom, mystery and resilience that undergirds the struggle for migrant survival. The works are never circumscribed to any one time or place, often playing on a tension between opacity and legibility, between coming together and falling apart — a proxy for the indeterminacy of the shifting ground beneath migration and the inevitable fading of intergenerational memory.
I like to think of my work and practice—part archive and remembrance, part mourning and reconciliation—as attempts to alchemize medicine to mend the ruptures of migration."
Gerardo Dexter Ciprian is a Dominican-American visual artist living and working on the unceded land of the Munsee Lenape, Schaghticoke and Wappinger peoples, also known as The Bronx, NY. Their work explores migration, diaspora and myth-making and has been exhibited nationally most recently at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, C24 Gallery and Field Projects. Recent awards and residencies include The Bronx Museum Block Gallery Residency, Wassaic Project Residency, Vermont Studio Center Residency, Portal: Governors Island Residency and the BRIO award from the Bronx Council on the Arts. He’s a current TIDEL Fellow at Union Theological Seminary, was a 2021 Bard at Brooklyn Public Library Fellow and a 2015 AIM Fellow at The Bronx Museum. They served as the 2020/21 co-director and are the current editor & designer of OPEN DOORS, an arts and disability justice non-profit initiative. He was an Adjunct Lecturer at the Spitzer School of Architecture at City College from 2022-2024, holds an M.Arch from the Yale School of Architecture (2009), and a B.S. from the University at Buffalo (2006).
We welcome Gerardo to the studio as our November WIP resident!