Today we’d like to introduce you to Angel Delgado.
Angel, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
Angel Delgado (born in Havana, Cuba in 1965).
Lives and works in Long Beach, California.
He graduated from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana and studied from 1984 to 1986 at the Higher Institute of the Arts in Havana.
In 1990, Delgado created a performance titled “The hope in the last that is being lost” in the collective exhibition “El Objeto Esculturado” that led to the prison, where he spent 6 months of deprivation of freedom, this experience marked his life and his work.
In 2005, he left Cuba and decided to stay permanently in Mexico City. He lived there until 2013, when he decided to immigrate to the United States. Delgado currently lives and works in Long Beach, CA.
In 2004, Delgado obtained an artist residency at The Mattress Factory in Philadelphia, and then in 2008, he won the MOLAA award in the category of sculpture and installation in Long Beach, California. In 2016 he is part of The Fountainhead Residency, Miami, Fl.
Delgado has participated in more than 100 individual and collective exhibitions in more than fifteen countries around the world. His work is included in several private and public collections.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
The work of Angel Delgado, goes around a point: the freedom of the individual or
the lack of this, his artwork is based fundamentally on the limitations, restrictions,
prohibitions, controls and lack of freedoms that are imposed on the human being
within the society.
Through keen observation of the everyday and the ordinary, Delgado is trying to transform those objects or situations that are the daily step in photographs, drawings, videos, paintings, installations and performance, with a poetic that makes us reflect on our lives, about social processes or on the same processes of artistic creation.
Have things improved for artists? What should cities do to empower artists?
In these times, where life in general has become more complicated, art has also become more difficult, and at the same time more commercial, the speed with which one lives and the needs of artists, has caused them to make a much more commercial art. It has become necessary to create art to live, and not create for love of art. At the same time, collecting has focused precisely on this type of art that is easy to consume, contemplative, leaving aside the artwork that invites you to reflect.
This phenomenon must begin to be corrected from the teaching in our art schools.
I have had the opportunity to participate in the last 4 art fairs LA Art Show, (with the Building Bridges Art Exchange Gallery) and I have seen this trend, every year there are more galleries that include commercial art, I think one of the ways to help art in our city, is to include more galleries and artists of contemporary art committed to reality and not to the art market.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
He has taken part in individual projects such as Absent Speech, Building Bridges Art Exchange, Santa Monica, 2017. Made in Morningside, Fountainhead Residency. Miami, FL, 2016. Revision, Aluna Art Foundation, Miami, Fl, 2015: Uncomfortable Landscape, Building Bridges Art Exchange, Santa Monica, CA, 2015. Constancy, Amanda Harris Gallery, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2014; Uncomfortable Landscapes, Nina Menocal Gallery, México, 2013. Inside Outside, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, EUA, 2011; Continous Limit, Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; 2009; Wake Up, Artane Gallery, Istanbul; Constancias, nina menocal gallery, Mexico City, 2006; Memorias Acumuladas, Galería Fúcares, Madrid, 2004. He also has worked as a curator in different exhibitions and is the creator and director of CLOSE UP International Video Art Festival.
Among his most important collective exhibitions are Cuba. Tatuare la Storia. Padiglione d’arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italia, 2016. An Island Apart: Cuban Artists in Exile. Miller Gallery, Westerville, Ohio, 2016. Mobility and Its Discontents. The 8th Floor, NY, 2015. Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today. Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI, 2015. 55 Premio Internazionale Bugatti Segantini, Nova Milanese (MB), 2014; Neues Sehen – New Vision. Till Richter Museum, Alemania, 2013; Citizens of the World: Cuba in Queens. Queens Museum. NewYork, 2013; La Revolución no será televisada, The Bronx Museum, New York, 2012; Video Cubano, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2011; Arte no es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000. Museo del Barrio. NY. EUA, 2008; Cuba Avant Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber collection, Harn Museum of Art in the University of Florida and John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL., 2007; Waiting List, Mestna Galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2006.
In 2016 Delgado participated in the artistic residence Fountainhead Recidency, in Mimai, Florida. In 2004 obtained an Artists Residence in The Mattress Factory Museum, Philadelphia; and in 2008 he won the MOLAA 08 Award in the Sculpture and tridimensional works category, Long Beach, CA.
Delgado has participated in different International Contemporary Art Fairs as MACO, Art Forum Berlin, Balelatina Basel, Art Miami America, Art Basel Miami, Docks Art Fair, PULSE Miami, PULSE New York, Hot Art Fair, CIRCA, Art Platform, The Armory Show and recently Miami Art in Context.
Selected Public Collections
Prins Claus Fonds, Amsterdam
Farber collection, New York/Miami Beach
EFC Holdings, Inc., Miami
Fine Arts Conservation, Inc., Vancouver
International Sculpture Center, New Jersey
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver B.C.
MOLAA, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, C.A.
Till Richter Museum, Buggenhagen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany
Selected Private Collections
Alain Servais, Bruselas, Bélgica
Amy Dean & Alan Kluger, Miami, USA
Karen & Robert Duncan, Lincoln, NE, USA
Dr. Raúl Cervantes, México, D.F.
Marco Antonio Beteta, México, D.F.
Kathy and Marc LeBaron
Rubin Collection
Kathryn and Dan Mikesell Collection
Contact Info:
- Website: www.angel-delgado.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: angeldelgadoartist
- Facebook: angeldelgadof
- Twitter: angeldelgadof
Image Credit:
Courtesy of the artist
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