The Artist’s Voice: David Antonio Cruz and Doron Langberg

Artists David Antonio Cruz and Doron Langberg join Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, for a conversation about their creative processes and the opportunities for liberation, intimacy, and queer authenticity in contemporary figurative art, as shown in their works exhibited in A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now. Joining the artists on the stage, Grace Sterling Stowell, founding executive director of the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Youth (BAGLY), will share her unique Boston perspective on the importance of visibility and representation for LGBTQ+ youth through the ongoing work at BAGLY.

Face coverings and proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test are required for programs taking place in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater.

 
About the Panelists
David Antonio Cruz is a Boston- and New York-based painter and mixed-media performance artist whose work centers Black, brown, and queer bodies. Inviting friends, family, artists, and others to be a part of his paintings has long been a part of Cruz’s process. In a new series of works, chosen family, the artist asks sitters to invite another person, or group of people, to gather with their chosen kin as a way to express the nonbiological bonds queer people form out of mutual support and love. Created during the pandemic, these intimate and collaborative moments of connection expand on conventional notions of family and portraiture. With festive color palettes, luminous skin tones, and lush patterning, Cruz’s paintings present his intersectional subjects in ways that defy conventions. His arrangements reimagine posture, autonomy, and rigidity to underscore the bonds and liberty of his sitters. In the artist’s words, “My work is a celebration of life, of being. Living in the moment and full of life. I treasure that. I had a choice to live as my authentic self or live for someone else a long time ago. I needed to live truthfully — so I chose me.”

Doron Langberg is a New York-based painter invested in the relationship between individual lived experiences and emotional states that are universal across social categories. Touch, physicality, and movement are significant areas of focus in his vivid paintings, which include portraits of his lovers, friends, family, and wider social circle. Langberg typically paints from life, creating small, observational pieces that he translates into large-scale paintings using a wide ranges of tools and techniques. Often depicting private, ordinary moments, his canvases combine highly rendered portions with gestural swaths of colorful brushstrokes, initiating an evocative dialogue between bodies and unrestrained sensation, while challenging figurative painting’s desire for completion. “I see my work as an aspirational space where queer experiences can embody more than just what they depict,” explains Langberg. “My paintings are both a real reflection of my everyday experiences, and an alternate reality where queerness is allowed to be expansive and generative.”

Grace Sterling Stowell has been a pioneering activist and leader in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) and social justice communities for over 40 years. Grace is the founding executive director of the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Youth (BAGLY), one of the oldest and largest LGBTQ youth organizations in the nation. Grace is a founding member of several local and national LGBTQ youth advocacy organizations, and she currently serves as an Executive Committee member of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth, a Steering Committee member of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC), and a Board Member of Breaktime. Grace is also a nationally known advocate and leader on the issues facing transgender youth and young adults.

Grace received a B.A. in English from Curry College in Milton, MA, and a M.A. in Counseling Psychology from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, and she currently resides in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. While Grace has served many roles in her community work over the past four decades, she is particularly honored to be known as “Mother” (and now “Grandmother!”) by three generations of greater Boston’s LGBTQ youth.