Director of Graduate Studies for Visual Arts, Painting Concentration Head, and Assistant Professor David Antonio Cruz is one of fifteen artists awarded a 2025 Latinx Art Fellowship. The $50,000 prize is administered by the US Latinx Art Forum and supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The 2025 Fellowship cohort was chosen to reflect the diverse, intergenerational experiences and practices within the Latinx art community.
"Receiving the Latinx Art Fellowship is a tremendous honor. Being recognized by peers and scholars for my commitment to my practice and research is incredibly meaningful to me. This fellowship will enable me to support the development of my studio practice further," Cruz said.
The U.S. Latinx Art Forum is the only national organization that exclusively champions Latinx visual art and art history. The goal of the fellowship is to raise visibility and support for Latinx artists whose contributions are essential to American culture, but have often lacked institutional recognition.
"This award is the first significant prize of its kind and celebrates the plurality and diversity of Latinx artists and aesthetics," said the US Latinx Art Forum.
Cruz is an artist whose paintings, drawings and installations interrogate Western traditions of representation and posing. His work uses queer discourse, fashion, history and pop culture like prisms to explore the complexities of race and queerness.
"I approach the act of posing as a form of opposition and resistance to social norms, embodying playfulness and subversion of the history of portraiture. Central to my work are explorations of orientation, lounging, entanglement, and queer desire. My practice represents a lifetime’s journey of developing a visual language to address the complexity and history of queer love, desire, gender, and touch," Cruz told the US Latinx Art Forum.
Cruz was born to and raised by Puerto Rican parents in Philadelphia. While his paintings have been shown at El Museo del Barrio, ICA Boston, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and Brooklyn Museum, his recent solo exhibits include stay, take your time, my love at ICA San Francisco (2025); hauntme at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (2025); and When The Children Come Home at ICA Philadelphia (2023). He received his BFA from Pratt Institute and his MFA from Yale University.
