Cyriaco Lopes

Affiliate Faculty, MFA of the Americas

Cyriaco Lopes is an artist who works at unbridgeable intersections - image/text, photography/sculpture - looking less for conciliation and mergers than for attrition, sparks. His life story is the very model for such a practice, as a Brazilian expat living in the U.S., part of two worlds and of none. Also, as a queer intellectual, as we are, by nature, participants/observers. These non-dichotomic dualities are also reflected in the long, instigating collaboration with the award-winning poet Terri Witek.

  • MFA, imaging and digital arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2002
  • MFA, visual languages (art history/studio arts), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1999
  • B.F.A., painting, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1993

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Cyriaco Lopes

Biography

New York-based Brazilian artist Cyriaco Lopes has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP), El Museo del Barrio in NYC, the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris, Casa Degli Artisti in Milan, among other international venues. His work has been curated by artists such as Lygia Pape, Janine Antoni, and Luciano Fabro, and by art critics such as Paulo Herkenhoff, Adriano Pedrosa, Alberto Saraiva, etc. He is the winner of the NYC World Studio Foundation Award, the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis Project Award, the São Paulo Phillips Prize of trip to Europe.

His performances in collaboration with poet Terri Witek have been seen at the Centro Nacional de Cultura in Lisbon, Portugal, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Salford Museum, in Manchester, England, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL, the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporanea, in Valencia, Spain, and Oi Futuro Center for Art & Technology, in Rio, Brazil.

The artist holds two MFAs: one in Imaging and Digital Arts, UMBC, Baltimore (thesis chair: Dr. Kathy O'Dell), and the other in Visual Languages, UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro (Thesis Chair: Dr. Paulo Venâncio Filho). He also attended artist's residencies such as Skowhegan, Parque Lage (Rio), the London Project, Helycon, Turkey (2018), MassMoca (2019) and the MacDowell Colony (where Lopes was a 2019 Marian O. Naumburg Photography fellow), etc.

Lopes co-teaches with Dr. Terri Witek at Stetson's low residency M.F.A. in the Poetry in the Expanded Field track. He is also an associate professor of art at John Jay College / the City University of New York.

More About Cyriaco Lopes

Areas of Expertise

  • Visual Art
  • Art History
  • Text-Based Art
  • Concrete Poetry
  • Visual Poetry
  • Art & Politics
  • Conceptual Arts

Course Sampling

  • Text-Based Intermedia Art
  • Experimental Approaches to Art-Making.