Today we’d like to introduce you to David Rios Ferreira.
Hi David, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
As far as I can remember, I’ve always drawn pictures. My mother would have a small pad of paper and pens for me to draw while on train rides throughout New York City.
Whether we were running errands together or visiting family, I would pass the time drawing the people I saw on the train or the landscape outside the train car windows. This skill was always encouraged by both my parents and my older siblings, who would take me to art events and museums.
These experiences informed my focus on getting an art education. I attended the High School of Art & Design in New York, where I studied traditional animation in hopes of working in film and television.
But it was when I took free classes with the Saturday Program and Outreach Program at The Cooper Union, that my ideas of how I could become an image-maker broadened. Later, I would attend The Cooper Union for college working with artists like Walid Raad, Shelly Silver, Ernesto Pujol, and Rina Banerjee, who helped me hone my voice and develop a studio practice that was as personal as it was research-based.
For almost 18 years, I have kept professional studio practice where I create mixed-media drawings, installations, and sculptures. I merge historical etchings, political cartoons, and children’s coloring books to produce dense and abstract hybrid forms in my art. All this source imagery that I appropriate is deconstructed and reconstituted to become what I call “temporal beings”—beings that speak to this idea that we carry within our body’s personal and political histories.
For my exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) in Salt Lake City, titled Transcending Time and Space, I explore community art-making, imagined time travel, and spirituality as a vehicle for thinking about love, loss, and memory. I ask visitors to the ACME Lab gallery at UMFA to contemplate those we’ve lost, others we miss across distances or even people we have yet to meet and invite you to imagine gateways and portals through which we may connect and “reach” these loved ones.
The exhibition features a collection of abstracted drawings, collages, photographs, and videos representative of these gateways.
I was moved to create this work based on the ever-growing tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous people—something I explore in collaboration with Denae Shanidiin and Restoring Ancestral Winds, a Tribal coalition responding to the violence perpetrated on Indigenous communities within the Great Basin and strengthening the traditional values of Indigenous relations.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
When I was invited by artist, curator, and educator Jorge Rojas to propose an exhibition for the ACME Lab and he shared the mission behind the lab.
Which is to promote collaboration between museum and community through active participation and to provide an avenue for mutual learning, discovery, and understanding, I found myself thinking about this exhibition as less as a traditional art exhibition of a body of work, but almost the way I would approach public artwork.
With public works, I tend to ask myself a few questions How can my work be relevant to that space or community? How can my specific aesthetic speak to that place and people, and because my visuals are based on image research, what relevant historical imagery, architecture, and culture could I incorporate that pays homage to a site and anchors it in that specific space?
And finally, a question I ask myself through any project is how will this new work speak to my interest in the ongoing impact the history of colonialism has in our daily lives? It wasn’t so much a struggle as a need to take thoughtful and intentional steps.
Steps that respected the work of my collaborator Denae Shanidiin, the community I was hoping to reach through this work, and the very issues surrounding colonial history, decentralization, and missing murdered Indigenous and LGBTQ people I sought to explore in the making of the work for this exhibition.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I merge historical etchings, 1930s political cartoons, and children’s coloring books in my 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 my family history and identity as a mainland Puerto Rican. I am heavily influenced by the deculturization practices conducted by the U.S. on children in Puerto Rico up until the 1950s—strategies my parents remember as nursery rhymes and school pledges.
My practice is also informed by the behavior exhibited by my nephews on the Autism Spectrum—of borrowing lines from cartoons to communicate. Their interest in animated films goes beyond childish obsession and becomes their source of language.
As my nephews remix existing material to navigate their world, I’m drawn to comparable practices in cultural costumes, masks, and ceremonies where 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 my work.
Coloring books and animation, historical references, and other appropriated images become my “found objects” in which I build new structures and forms that embody our complex, emotional, psychological, messy, sometimes beautiful, and confusing relationship with colonial history.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
This is always a difficult question to answer, and how one starts out will be different for everyone, but my good friend and artist Firelei Baez put it beautifully, “being an artist is a marathon, not a sprint.”
It takes time to build momentum. It takes time to find and build your voice. I’m still trying to find and hone my own. It’s called an art practice. Continue to learn more about your art and more about yourself.
It can sometimes be discouraging and maybe even a little frustrating to not see your career move at a comparable pace to colleagues and peers, but if this is what you want to do, you will find a way to do it.
Contact Info:
- Email: david@davidriosart.com
- Website: https://umfa.utah.edu/index.php/transcending-time-and-space
- Instagram: @davidriosart @utahmuseumoffinearts
