Ernesto Pujol was born in Cuba, grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and has lived and worked in New York City since 1983. Pujol is a site-specific performance artist, social choreographer, and educator with an interdisciplinary practice. His work in painting, prints, installations, and photography explores concepts of exile, memory, freedom, and gender. Pujol received his BA in humanities and painting from the Universidad de Puerto Rico and his MFA in interdisciplinary art practice from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pujol has received fellowships from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation/NEA Regional Fellowships and grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Pujol participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in January 1999. (SOURCE: Light Work, Syracuse, NY)
Ernesto Pujol is an American performance artist and social choreographer. He is often commissioned to create durational group performances as the complex psychic portraits of societies, in the Jungian sense.
Pujol pursued undergraduate work in humanities and visual arts, followed by studies in Western monasticism, and graduate work in education, media theory, and art therapy. Pujol has an MFA in interdisciplinary studio practice from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He resides in Fox Hill House, an 18th century historic farmhouse in upstate New York, but he keeps an office in Downtown Brooklyn.
Pujol has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Pratt Institute, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Hartford Art School, the University of Utah, and Parsons The New School. He has lectured at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, the Maine College of Art, New York University, and Bard College, among others.
During the 1990s, Pujol became known for ephemeral, site-specific, installation projects publicly addressing individual and collective repressed memories. In 1997, Pujol represented the United States in the Second Johannesburg Biennial, South Africa, the Second Saaremaa Biennial, Estonia, and the Sixth Havana Biennial, Cuba.
Pujol believes that the creative critical thinking tools of socially engaged artists are more relevant than ever to the sustainability of American democracy, and to environmental restoration, within an impoverished yet increasingly diverse nation. Pujol strives to reclaim public space from clutter, noise, and speed, stripping historic architecture and revisiting landscape. His durational group performances consist of minimal repetitive gestures that generate silence, slowness, and stillness, creating a space-within-the-space for interiority, if not the awakening of consciousness.
Ernesto Pujol has been the recipient of fellowships from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Cintas Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Art Matters. He has served with the New York State Council on the Arts, the Academy for Educational Development, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC. (SOURCE: "Biographical Note," artist's website, http://www.ernestopujol.org, accessed 10/16/18)
