Carl Ferrero is a queer and nonbinary artist from New York whose works include painting, watercolor and sculptural objects.
Ferrero’s practice focuses on personal, sociopolitical and cultural themes from a queer perspective; particularly how queer and transgender people are identified, represented and governed, and how they endure.
Recent narrative and defiantly queer watercolors articulate cultural similarities and differences between the viewer and the subject.
The philosophy of this work could be described as the research question, ‘What does it mean to be a queer artist now?’ with all the richness and diversity of experience that query implies.
Formally, the pictures defy spatial logic, depicting contradictory perspectives, shifting horizons and disorienting compositions that inform impossible environments.
Visual references and motifs lifted from the Western art-historical canon and contemporary media are imbued with new, critically inflected meaning. Masculinity is turned inside out to build a world populated with people whose gender identities are formed under extreme pressure and prejudice.
Ferrero has exhibited work at Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of Art, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Editions), The Elizabeth Foundation Gallery, Feature Inc., Vox Populi and other venues in the US and internationally. Carl was awarded grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2017), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2011), and they have received fellowships from the Millay Colony and AIM / Bronx Museum. Carl’s work has been featured in publications by Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, The New School, BOMB, and Pilot Press.
They received their MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College, where they studied with Vito Acconci, Patricia Cronin, and Elizabeth Murray. They are currently working on their Master’s degree in Social Work at Columbia University.
