This Summer, Catch Professor David Antonio Cruz's Installations Across NYC

This summer, Visual Arts' Director of Graduate Studies, Concentration Head of Painting, and Assistant Professor David Antonio Cruz reenvisions interiors across two boroughs: at PES Futures—a satellite initiative of the Project for Empty Space in Manhattan's historic Chinatown—and the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center in the Bronx.

Cruz's solo show at PES Futures, black/backroom, is a site-specific installation that furthers his prior work uncovering Queer-Brown-Histories by transforming the intimate gallery into a third space: a place to rest, imagine, and give way to potentialities. A wallpaper in Cruz's signature maximalist style layers flora from important geographies in the artist's life: Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, and New York. The exhibition is a double homecoming of sorts: the glitzy chandeliers that crowd the gallery, dripping with with colorful, sparkly charms—symbols of queer decadence and splendor across Cruz's work—call back to his debut show at PES in 2016, where he first exhibited the chandeliers as an inaugural PES Artist in Residence.

Cruz's concurrent solo exhibition utilizes the space and natural beauty of Wave Hill—a 28-acre public garden and cultural center in the Bronx that overlooks the Hudson River and Palisades—to explore ideas of home and its intersections with geography, diaspora, queer culture, and autobiography. iknowyou'vewonderedwherei'vebeen; adrift,astare,atilt,asigh,exhale combines his deliciously colorful and layered large-scale portraits of friends and chosen kin with new chandeliers and wallpaper—including one that layers the landscapes outside of Glyndor Gallery with his father's childhood home in Puerto Rico—to immersive effect. Cruz brings Wave Hill's former private estate to life, blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces with his decorative interruptions of architectural details.

Philadelphia-bred, New York-based artist David Antonio Cruz received his BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and his MFA from Yale University. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and completed the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum, New York. Recent residencies and fellowships include the Joan Mitchell Artist in Residency (2025); Skowhegan Alumni Residency, Maine (2021); LMCC Workspace Residency, New York (2015); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award (2018), and Mass Cultural Council's Artist Fellowships (2022). Cruz's work has been included in notable exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C (2014/2021) and El Museo del Barrio, New York (2006/2016), and was recently on view in When The Children Come Home: a solo exhibition at ICA Philadelphia (2023), A Place For Me: Figurative Painting Now at ICA Boston (2022), and The Block Museum at Northwestern (2022), among many others. He serves on the board at Project for Empty Space.

black/backroom is on view through August 1 at PES Futures at 128 Baxter St. 

iknowyou'vewonderedwherei'vebeen; adrift,astare,atilt,asigh,exhale is up at Wave Hill's Glyndor Gallery at 675 West 252nd St. through August 9, 2026.