Bruno Casiano: Pieces of Me

He emulates silkscreen printing with these materials, highlighting the technique’s importance in traditional Puerto Rican artistic practice. The exhibition features richly-varied collages that the artist embeds with textiles he has collected in common places—from around his home, in attics, and scouring thrift stores. By combining found fabrics with methods of making that pay tribute to his heritage, Casiano creates visual mappings that, “suggest pieces of [his] memories binding together in an intrinsically abstract fashion, as a poem that leads you down a river without letting you know what awaits ahead.” The artist’s vibrant abstractions regularly feature mountains, mangos, ceiba trees, caves, lizards, and water—pieces of his identity that recall moments from his adolescence and carry them into the present.
Pieces of Me inaugurates moCa’s yearlong institutional residency with the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center. During this residency, the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center, an organization located in Cleveland’s Brooklyn Centre neighborhood, will occupy space at moCa and co-design an artist residency and programming that helps to further its mission of transforming lives by preserving, educating, and promoting Latino heritage through the teaching and practice of history, culture, the visual, performing, and literary arts.
​Additional support for Bruno Casiano: Pieces of Me and the Julia de Burgos Institutional Residency provided by The Callahan Foundation.
About the Artist:
Bruno Casiano is a Puerto Rican artist based in Cleveland, Ohio who combines traditional and contemporary techniques in his works of art. Born in Gary, Indiana, the son of a steel worker, Bruno’s family moved to his father’s home-town, Juana Diaz, a southern central community in Puerto Rico, when he was just 10 years old. Young Casiano developed an interest in art, awakened by these new surroundings and by the sense of living in an Island full of nature, which made a great impression on him. Influenced by the richness of his culture, he merged in expressing cultural driven visual themes. Casiano is a mature and well-trained artist. He started his education at the Escuela de Artes Plasticas in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, then he received a full scholarship to attend Altos de Chavon School of Design in Dominican Republic and Cleveland Institute of Art. Casiano also was a gallery owner for many years in the Gordon Square Art District, one of the first galleries to open in the neighborhood.
More at brunocasianogallery.com.