Gerardo Dexter Ciprian is a Dominican-American visual artist based in The Bronx, NY, situated on the unceded land of the Munsee Lenape, Schaghticoke, and Wappinger peoples. Ciprian’s work explores migration, diaspora and myth-making and has been exhibited nationally at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, C24 Gallery, Field Projects, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Black and White Gallery and The Angel Orensanz Foundation. Recent awards and residencies including 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. His work has appeared or been reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and ArtNet Magazine, and published in the book Architecture Inserted (W. W. Norton & Co., 2012). During 2020/21, Ciprian served as co-director and currently holds the role of editor and designer for OPEN DOORS, an arts and disability justice initiative which invests in the creativity and leadership of Black and brown wheelchairs users and inspires action for safer more just communities. He’s an Adjunct Lecturer at Spitzer School of Architecture, holds an M.Arch from the Yale School of Architecture (2009), and a B.S. from the University at Buffalo (2006).
STATEMENT
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.
CONTACT: dexterciprian.studio(at)gmail(dot)com