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Ernesto Pujol is a conceptual artist and educator with an interdisciplinary art practice [1]. Pujol was born in 1957 in Havana, Cuba and spent time in Puerto Rico and Spain before relocating to the United States in 1979[2]. Pujol engaged in a number of intellectual pursuits doing undergraduate work in humanities and visual arts at the University of Puerto Rico, in Spanish art history at the Universidad Complutense in Spain and in philosophy at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Florida [3]. He pursued graduate work in education at the Universidad Interamericana in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in art therapy at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and in communications and media theory at Hunter College in New York City [4]. Pujol received his MFA specializing in interdisciplinary art from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago [5].

Pujol first became known during the 1990’s for a series of site-specific installation projects that dealt with collective and individual memory [6]. His more recent work has taken a political turn in dealing with subjects such as war, ecological issues, loss and mourning [7]. Since 2006, Pujol has been exploring the notions of interiority and public and private spaces [8]. He strives to reclaim public space from the noise and conjestion to create spaces silent spaces of solitude[9]. The artist seeks to awaken the consciousness of the viewer through the creation of such spaces[10]. The writings of Carol Brecker have served as a source of inspiration for Pujol with notions of citizenship, such as the artist as citizen and the citizenship of art within American democracy[11]. The artist has worked extensively with a variety of media ranging from video, photography, painting, sculpture and performance.

Ernesto Pujol has represented the United States in 1997 at the Second Johannesburg Biennial in South Africa, the Sixth Havana Biennial in Cuba and the Second Saaremaa Biennial in Estonia[12]. He has also received a number of prestigious fellowships from institutions such as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Art Matters and the New York Foundation for the Arts[13]. Pujol has also been an active participant with a number of arts institutions serving with the Academy for Educational Development, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts[14].


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