Brenda Cruz

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 14, 1974. She is a multidisciplinary artist, historian and researcher based in Madrid, Spain since 1997. In her artistic production, Cruz explores identity issues, from individual, social, cultural or gender identity, as well as the construction of colonial discourses and their power relations, using her review of historical and bibliographical sources, as well as her own life experience as a Puerto Rican in exile.

The artist continues a characteristic line of reflections in her poetics, related to the detection of the limits to which identity discourses are subject, and which are generally imposed by the mechanisms of power of cultural coercion. The continuous exploration of the colonial and postcolonial realities that cultures live in contact with the West, and that has led this creator to consider politically questioning the very social situation of the Boricua insular context, now leads her to investigate the marks that the gaze of the Other has left over his own identity. The autobiographical allusions that these resin torsos of Brenda translate may belong to the imaginary of any contemporary individual who has faced travel, emigration, the experience of living within a culture that was ...

Education: 2016 Doctorado / PHD en Pintura, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,Facultad de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain. Thesis: El arte camalenico de Marcos de Marcos Irizarry: entre el informalismo espaol y la abstraccin americana. Obtention DEA, Diploma de Estudios Avanzados, Departamento de Pintura, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2003. Periodo de investigacion concluido bajo el tema: Conceptos en el Arte
Contemporaneo. Tesina presentada: Arte abstracto e identidad nacional en Puerto Rico,2002/03.
1991-1996Bachiller en Artes / Bachelor degree (1995), Departamento de Bellas Artes, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Ro Piedras, San Juan,Puerto Rico. Fine arts-Painting and engraving. In addition, she has carried out training courses and workshops, among which are: New
technologies / New artistic practices, directed by José Luis Brea at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 2000. She participated in the II Symposium Meetings on video at the University of Salamanca, at the Faculty of Fine Arts in the same year. In 1998, she traveled to Asilah, Morocco and worked for three months in a residency at L'Atelier, and then exhibited the work titled De las selvas perdidas, a work she created during...

As an artist, researcher, and academic, she has participated in various cultural initiatives in Puerto Rico and Spain. She has offered talks, conferences and interviews at different universities, museums, congresses, radio stations and artistic centers. Among which are the communication entitled Portrait of a (de)colonized: a photographic album of my multicultural identity, within the framework of the II International Congress on Art and Identity Politics Visualizations and narratives of memory: urban space, nature, migrations, technology and gender, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Murcia, in 2019, and was interviewed by Norma Valle on Radio Universidad's Agenda de Hoy program, on the occasion of the Portrait of a (de)colonized woman.
In her artistic production, Cruz explores identity issues, from individual, social, cultural or gender identity, as well as the construction of colonial discourses and their power relations, using her review of historical and bibliographical sources, as well as her own life experience as a Puerto Rican in exile. She has had individual exhibitions and has participated in countless group shows, in institutions and museums in Puerto Rico, as well as in Spain, Philadelphia, New York City,...