Latinx Artist Fellowship

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Tony Cruz Pabón

Visual Artist

San Juan, Puerto Rico

https://tonycruzpabon.com/

Instagram @tony_cruz_pabon

I pay special attention to details in the landscape, the horizon, clouds, leaf, and plant accumulations, such as the Tillandsia recurvata, the smallest bromeliad in Puerto Rico. As a survival strategy, they grow in dense groups on top of tree branches, walls or electrical wires. Their curved leaves and the shape they take on as they come together allows them to absorb necessary nutrients from particles suspended in the air. At a formal and conceptual level, I want to adopt this strategy.

Tony Cruz Pabón is an artist who lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work has always been guided by an attention to an economy of materials, to experience the extraordinary in the everyday, and in what is light and minimal. His work spans different media like drawing, animation, and photography, and has been shown in: Flow States, LA TRIENAL El Museo del Barrio (2024), Puerto Rico Negrx, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (2023), Lo que pesa una cabeza, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (2022), Artefact: Parallel Crossings in STUK, Belgium (2019), We Don’t Need Another Hero,10th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2018), Spirit Levels in the CCA Glasgow (2014), the III Trienal Poli/gráfica de San Juan (2012), The Peripatetic School, Drawing Room in London (2011). He is cofounder of Beta-Local (2009); a space that, among other things, is an experimental education project and production space; a platform of critical discussion in San Juan, PR.

Selected Works

A series of vertical graphite lines form a rectangular shape on a white wall. Within the rectangular form, the density of the lines varies, resulting in an array of gray tones. The totality of the lines represent the distance from San Juan, Puerto Rico and El Museo del Barrio in New York City.
A metal and wood cylindrical hollow structure sits in the center of the frame in a lush forest climate, resembling a backyard. The shape of the structure is designed to amplify the sound of rain. A blurred figure of a person in movement is in the foreground.
A table with eight wheeled legs on a checkered floor is covered with objects accumulated by the artist between 2017 and 2022 including stones, paint, paper, thread, wire, bricks, dominoes and more creating various shapes and angles. The arrangement of these objects, like a diary, contains traces of the transformation of ideas through a human time scale. Two unilluminated standing lamps are on either side of the table on the right and left.