ARTIST STATEMENT

My current investigation is the exploration of self designed, staged actions, through performance, sculpture, installation, theatrics and audience participation. 

The conceptual process consists of reacting to social events through my individual experience, often resulting in the visual investigation of isolated, self-absorbed imagery or quite radically the opposite, resulting in commentary and interaction with the social collective. I utilize myself as a case study with the premise that any reactions I have to these social events, psychological or physical, affect my behavior as an everyday citizen, therefore possibly describing mass behavior.  

I understand contemporary art and contemporary art history to have a type of kinship with the idea of truth, usually camouflaged by the complexities of inherent human contradictions, which make concepts all the more interesting. I choose to represent with a rational approach experiences which are emotional, an effort to verbalize and categorize the instinct. 

BIOGRAPHY

Quintín Rivera Toro was born in Caguas, Puerto Rico in 1978. He holds a B.F.A. in Sculpture from Hunter College, New York - 2001; B.A. in Communications and Film Studies, from the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras - 2007; and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island - 2013

Quintín has been awarded the German DAAD travel grant; A full fellowship for the Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson, Vermont; A studies grant from the National Academy of Design in New York City; He has been an artist in residence at the Ox Bow School of Art, S.A.I.C., in Saugatuck, Michigan; An intern at the Chinati Museum in Marfa, Texas; Has studied with the Escuela Internacional de Teatro de América Latina y el Caribe (E.I.T.A.L.C.) in Cuernavaca, Mexico; He was awarded an Achievement Scholarship from the Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany. An Individual Artist Grant as well as a New Genres Fellowshipfrom the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. He received a Sylvia Leslie Young Herman Scholarship Award and Academic Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. The New York Times has called Quintín's work "Striking Contemporary Art" and was selected for Refinery 29 's "Top 10 list of rising NYC art stars" curated by Casey Fremont.