Rey is currently a distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia[1] and in 2012 was inducted into the Burchfield Penney Art Center's Living Legacy Project.

[1] After finishing his undergraduate education, Rey briefly lived in Boston, MA, before returning to Miami, FL to work on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Surrounded Islands Project in 1982.

After working at the Joan of Arts Studio in Hollywood, FL, Rey pursued graduate studies north at the University of Buffalo and received his Master of Fine Arts Degree specializing in drawing and painting in 1987 (Bosch 2014, 15-16), and began traveling including the countries Spain, Italy, Morocco, Mexico, Caribbean, Iceland, Portugal, England, Wales, Cuba, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Nepal, and New Zealand, heightening an appreciation for the connections between different cultures and their relationship to their environment.

His abstract period of work from 1982 to 1992 involved layering Cuban iconography with his American experiences, symbolizing the struggles of fleeting memories and the romanticization of one's culture.

The same year, The Burchfield-Penney Art Center inducted his work “Holy Angels Church and Chair” (1987; mixed media on canvas mounted on board, 96 x 56 inches) into their permanent collection.

Soon after, Rey's work was inducted into El Museo del Barrio’s (New York City, NY) permanent collection, and he had his first solo NYC show at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MoCHA).

The latter project brings low-middle income area children on monthly fishing trips and has helped brook trout numbers make a resurgence in population.

[13] The project's exhibition opened at the Siddhartha Art Gallery at Barbar Mahal Revisited in Kathmandu, Nepal, Nov. 20, featuring fourteen paintings, water samples, the documentary "BAGMATI" and artwork by Nepalese artists.

[13] The project consisted of collecting scientific data about water quality, pollution, human impact, climate change, and plans to improve the health of the Bagmati river and inform neighboring communities about conservation methods.

[13] The project's goal was to present information, in an accessible manner, to explain how the holiest river in a country became a health threat and how to provide the residents of Kathmandu and other similar communities safer practices and choices in supplying water for their families.

[18] Bioregionalism is a field studying an environment's natural flora and fauna, related geographic information, and connected biological areas in order to establish native from non-native species and how to effectively conserve and protect biodiversity.

The Biological Regionalism Series began as a way to connect people to their local environments using imagery of native fish species, landscapes, and waterscapes in various media including painting, sculpture, installation, scientific data, and video recordings.

Influenced by the 19th-century landscape and fauna painters like Winslow Homer and John James Audubon who depicted wilderness in art as something not only to be marveled at, but to be studied, documented, and understood.

[1]: 31–32, 120–121  Rey's work in this series includes naturalistic depictions of fish swimming in their environments some of which are waterways polluted by man's increased commercially-driven enterprises.

[13] The project exhibition opened at the Siddhartha Art Gallery at Barbar Mahal Revisited in Kathmandu, Nepal, Nov. 20, featuring fourteen paintings, water samples, the documentary "BAGMATI" and artwork by Nepalese artists.

[13] The project consisted of collecting scientific data about water quality, pollution, human impact, climate change, and plans to improve the health of the Bagmati river and inform neighboring communities about conservation methods.

[13] The project's stated goal was to present information in an accessible manner to explain how the holiest river in a country became a health threat and how to provide the residents of Kathmandu and other similar communities safer practices and choices in supplying water for their families.

[14]Moved by the passing of his sister, Mayda, and his father-in-law, Neil Strong, Rey's series confronted death directly by depicting sick, dying, and deceased steelhead fish.

[1]: 37, 137–139 Returning to the United States after visiting Cuba in 1998 for the first time in over 30 years signaled a thematic change for Rey, creating work that investigated other aspects of his identity besides his Cuban heritage like exploring his passion for environmental conservation and researching art history.

As he traveled for the previous 25 years collecting imagery and discarded paintings by amateur artists, Rey wanted to give these abandoned works new life.

In an effort to analyze what he valued, he painted beloved memories including moments with his family, cultural religions symbols, and imagery from his childhood in a small rural coal-mining town in Pennsylvania.

Bosch described how Rey's desire to reconnect to his Cuban identity as an American with no actual memories of his country, shifted his work to depict objects and experiences that meant “Cuba” to him as they were described in stories told by his relatives.

The construction of the boxes and the transformation of ordinary sights likened to altars in religious customs, connecting Rey's new home to his Cuban heritage and traditions.

[1]: 253–256 The 2005 black and white video “An Unkept Promise” (19:00 run-time) details the emotional journey of Rey taking his first return trip to his home country of Cuba 36 years after emigrating with his family as a child.

The MEIAC (Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo) in Badajoz, Spain, hosted the exhibition “Biological Regionalism”, a retrospective of Rey's videography, in 2013.

[34] During the exhibition, the MEIAC acquired several of Rey's films into their permanent collection including “Waters off of Caribarien, Cuba,” “Seeing the Dark,” “Primal Connections,” “An Unkept Promise” and more videos from the Biological Regionalism series entitled “Reiter Creek, Sheridan, New York, USA” and “Horseshoe Lake, Monroe, Louisiana, USA.”[1] The Masur Museum and the MEIAC ( (Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo) in Badajoz, Spain also collected “Biological Regionalism: Black Bayou, Monroe, Louisiana, USA” (Color Video, 3:15 run-time).

[1] "Los Jardines de la Reina (The Queen’s Gardens), Cuba, July 10th, 2004," Color Video, 5:40, was collected in 2005 by the Art Museum of University of Virginia.

It screened in 2013 at the Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, in 2008 at Washington and Lee University and in 2005 at El Museo Francisco Oller y Diego Rivera in Buffalo, NY.

Bosch, 187–218, color plate 43, in Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora, editor, Jorge Duany, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, FL.

[41](2009) “Identity, Memory, and Diaspora: Voices of Cuban-American Artists, Writers, and Philosophers,”Jorge J. E. Gracia, Lynette Bosch, and Isabel Alvarez Borland, ed.