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David Rios Ferreira’s work is a repository of personal and political history. Historical etchings, 1930s political cartoons, and children’s coloring books merge to produce eerily alluring abstract drawings, mixed media sculptures, murals, and installations. Clusters of lines and layers of color dominate space creating dense hybrid forms. Familiar characters like Astro Boy, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan are deconstructed and reconstituted 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. He has had solo exhibitions at Rush Arts Corridor Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), BRIC (Brooklyn, 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. from The Cooper Union.

Rios Ferreira was born in the Bronx, NY, and currently lives and works in Jersey City, Newark, NJ, and New York City.