David Antonio Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersectionality of queerness and race, celebrating chosen family, and honoring not just where we consider home but who we consider home. Incorporating literature, language, and sculptural elements, his work engages portraiture as a place of permanence and as a form of resistance to normative conventions. Cruz’s exhibition at the Halsey Institute will expand on his recent explorations in drawing and installation featuring new and recent work. 

Cruz’s drawings are created with layers of ink washes under silhouettes of maps, foliage, and whispers of wax pencil figure drawings, inviting viewers to spend time getting to know the people and place within and revealing more with each careful look. These drawings often reappear as wallpaper and textiles in the background of his playful paintings of chosen family, which center Black, Brown, and queer bodies in the art historical canon of Baroque seated portraiture, a genre from which they were often erased. Culminating with an offering for the viewer to sit and linger, immersed in Cruz’s work through a site-specific installation, the exhibition highlights companionship as wayfinding to empowered authenticity and safe harbor in the people we choose to surround ourselves with. 

The Halsey Institute’s Artist Talks are free and open to the public.