Oscar Rene Cornejo

PAFA is pleased to welcome artist Oscar Rene Cornejo to campus for the Spring 2020 Visiting Artists Program series.

PAFA's Visiting Artists Program is a student-run program that brings a roster of local, national and international artists to campus for lectures, critiques, and workshops. The program exposes students and the public to a range of artistic approaches and fosters discussion about contemporary art and ideas.

Oscar Rene Cornejo is a New York-based artist who was born in Houston, Texas. With a background in pedagogy and activism, Cornejo’s socially engaged practice draws together histories of abstraction in the U.S. and Latin America with personal experiences of the construction site, family memory, and historical forgetting. In 2004, he cofounded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad), where for seven years he directed artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through community art education. He is a founding member of Junte Adjuntas, an artist project based in Adjuntas, a town in the mountains of southern Puerto Rico. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including White Flag, at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (2017), Collective Solid, Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, TX (2015); and Parliament of Owls, Diverseworks, Houston, TX (2015). Cornejo has collaborated with Recess: Assembly's 2018 fall cycle via States of Exception in Brooklyn and presented work at the Queens Museum for the Queens International 2018: Volumes. He is a Fulbright alum (2007), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alum (2014), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace residency alum (2016), attended Yvonne Residency in Gautemala (2017), holds a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, and an MFA from Yale University. Cornejo teaches at the Cooper Union and Hunter College.