David Antonio Cruz (born 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, video, and performance.
[1] His work has been shown in a number of venues, including El Museo del Barrio, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and has been awarded several fellowships.
"[4] In Philadelphia and New York, his identity was never contested, but, during his first exhibit in Puerto Rico, David was talked about as a "foreign" artist.
Cruz's work represents the life of those migrating families that either left their homeland, stayed, or went back and are divided between two places.
[5] In his practice, he fuses video, fashion, performance, and painting to explore and redefine queerness, diasporic, psychological, and ever-shifting unnamed spaces.
Cruz was commissioned by El Museo del Barrio with support from the Franklin Furnace Fund to create The Opera.
Broken plates, hidden images behind thick dripping chocolate and white paint, fragile paper planes, chairs, period piece costumes, and splinters of glass in sparkling red high heel shoes are paired with screams, opera singing, and hysterical laughter.
He wrote, "Through a variety of new and found materials, such as enamel, gold-leaf, china, constructed costumes and rags, I layer my paintings and build up their surfaces in an attempt to make visible the queer body, to dress it, and depict the space where it exists.
"[11] The artist cites "the fantasy world of Dorothy's Oz and the politics of Maria's West Side Story" stating that "personal narratives, American and queer history events, classic films, and fashion" anchor his work.