Bruno Casiano: "Pieces of Me"

moCa Cleveland

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• Date Friday, January 27, 2023 - Sunday, April 09, 2023
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Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) plays an urgent and exciting role in the city's cultural landscape. As a non-collecting institution and the region’s only contemporary art museum, moCa is ever-changing, introducing new exhibitions three times a year and creating... more

In Pieces of Me, Bruno Casiano uses painting, collage, and stenciling to explore memories and experiences drawn from his Puerto Rican heritage and upbringing in the small town of Juana Diaz. He emulates silkscreen printing with these materials, highlighting the technique’s importance in traditional Puerto Rican artistic practice. The exhibition features richly-varied collages that the artist embeds with textiles he has collected in common places—from around his home, in attics, and scouring thrift stores. By combining found fabrics with methods of making that pay tribute to his heritage, Casiano creates visual mappings that, “suggest pieces of [his] memories binding together in an intrinsically abstract fashion, as a poem that leads you down a river without letting you know what awaits ahead.” The artist’s vibrant abstractions regularly feature mountains, mangos, ceiba trees, caves, lizards, and water—pieces of his identity that recall moments from his adolescence and carry them into the present.

Pieces of Me inaugurates moCa’s yearlong institutional residency with the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center. During this residency, the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center, an organization located in Cleveland’s Brooklyn Centre neighborhood, will occupy space at moCa and co-design an artist residency and programming that helps to further its mission of transforming lives by preserving, educating, and promoting Latino heritage through the teaching and practice of history, culture, the visual, performing, and literary arts.

Bruno Casiano, Cleveland, 2008. Mixed medium, paint, collage. 72 x 72 inches (182.88 x 182.88 cm). Courtesy the artist.