Ernesto Pujol

2025 Stepping Stone Grantee

Bio

Ernesto Pujol's long multidisciplinary practice has exhibited a wide range, handling art as a genealogy of flexible mediums at the cultural service of the challenges facing the human condition. Starting as a narrative painter of colonial taxonomies during the 1980s, his visual gestures evolved into full-immersion installations as critical architectural manifestations of the construction of queer masculinity against the abuses of patriarchy. By the late 1990s, Pujol had transformed into a durational public performance artist and entered the new millennium as a large-scale social choreographer, working with vulnerable communities and landscapes under threat. The last two decades find him engaged in environmentalism as a horticultural rewilder and experimental educator, founding The Listening School and writing to reform American art education.

Systems of Weight, 2014Performance (Walking sample)By the second day, the long canvas bags were torn and began to spread their sand as a cathartic metaphor of psychic release. This created a wide river of sand which acted as an installation afterwards. Toward closure, the audience began to walk with the performers, as sandbags were available to them.