I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes : David Rios Ferriera and Shoshanna Weinberger

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Shoshanna Weinberger received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2003, and her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. Living and working in Newark, NJ for the

past 14 years, Weinberger explores the standards and consequential implications and experiences of racial identity and external perception or imposition of racial categorization. Much of Weinberger’s work is rooted in an exploration of her Caribbean-American heritage. It draws strongly on the complexity of heritage and assumed norms as she goes about defining the female archetype. Referencing her own adolescent memory and our current xenophobic zeitgeist, Weinberger renders her female muses along a spectrum of character types. Some are excessive, sexualized, and quirky; while others are passive, or dominant, a culmination of figures that ultimately question standards and the psychology of beauty and identity.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous invitational group and solo exhibitions. Weinberger is a five-time participant of the Jamaica Biennial from 2006 to 2017 held in Kingston, Jamaica; and her work was included in the 2013 Martinique Biennale. A recipient of several awards, residencies, and grants that include: 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant; 2015 Joan Mitchell Center, Art-in-Residence, New Orleans; 2016 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts; 2017-2018 Project for Empty Space, Art-in-Residence, Newark, NJ; 2019 Dawn Scott Memorial Award, Summer Exhibition, National Gallery of Jamaica; and recently appointed as a 2019-2020 McMillan Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art;

Public collections include New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; The Sagamore Collection, Miami, FL; Girls Club Collection, Fort Lauderdale, FL; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL.; Davidson College, Davidson, NC

David Rios Ferreira was born in Bronx, NY and currently lives and works in Jersey City and New York City. In his mixed-media drawings and sculptures, appropriated images from coloring books and animation, 18th-century newspaper etchings, and political cartoons from the 1900s coalesce into a study on identity formation—an investigation of race, nation, sexuality, and gender. Familiar cartoon characters are deconstructed and reinterpreted to become temporal beings and transmitters of imagined histories. These beings, and the space they inhabit, furnish an in-between reality—a reality that signals how the body both bears and transforms historical memory.

Rios Ferreira has exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including Seattle, WA and Berlin, Germany, and has had solo exhibitions at Rush Arts Corridor Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY) and the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, (Brattleboro, VT). He has held residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York, NY), and The Center for Book Arts (New York, NY). Rios Ferreira has participated in professional development programs such as Emerge 11 at Aljira (Newark, NJ) and the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program (Bronx, NY). Awards include a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, a National Association of Latino Arts & Culture Fund for the Arts grant, and the ArtSlant Grand Prize. David Rios Ferreira received a B.F.A. at The Cooper Union.