Artist Profile
Michael Cuadrado
Michael Cuadrado is an artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a BFA in Drawing from Pratt Institute and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting & Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.
CV
EDUCATION
2024 MFA Candidate in Painting/Printmaking - Yale School of Art
2018 BFA in Drawing - Pratt Institute
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2022 Two Slow Dancers, Coco Hunday, Tampa, FL
2021 Young and Plastic, Harkawik, New York, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2022 The New Earth, Public Works, Chicago, IL
2022 Electric Pink Lemonade, Circle Contemporary, Chicago, IL
2022 2 Meters is 6 Feet, Patient Info, Chicago, IL
2022 The Space Between Us, Co-Prosperity, Chicago, IL
2022 The Pamphlet Show, Patient Info, Chicago, IL
2021 AFTERBURN, Private Practice, Austin, TX
2021 Speech Sounds, Harkawik, New York, NY
2020 Direct Sunlight, LVL3, Chicago, IL
2020 Online Exhibition #63: Hoarders House, Fields Project, New York, NY
RESIDENCIES
2022-2023 BOLT Artist-in-Residence, Chicago Artists Coalition
2020 Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, Conversations In Practice: Winter Intensive
2020 The Wassaic Project, Winter Residency
2017 Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, Leroy Neiman Foundation Fellowship
Artist Statement
Largely influenced by ideas around phenomenology, queer theory, and semiotics, my work is considering the history of painting in order to address topics within sexuality/desire, spirituality, and my complex relationship to Western thinkers and painters. In an attempt to navigate the perplexities of romantic love, I am interested in the use of symbols and colors and their relationship to what we may think of as objective truth. My interest in the history of Western painting comes from a place of both affinity and aversion. It reinforces my fascination with the subject, but also functions as the origin to this circuit of fraught desires.
Much of this developed after a gradual realization of my own disorientation towards my surroundings as a queer body of color exploring the fragility of his sexuality. The reinterpretation of symbols and their relations to color are all in hopes of answering the question: How should we love? though this process might be in vain.