Luis Cruz Azaceta, born 1942, is a Cuban American visual artist.
He left Cuba as a teenager in 1960. After immigrating to the United States, Azaceta lived in New York, graduated from The School of Visual Arts and began his long career as an artist.
Since the late 1970s, the paintings and drawings of Luis Cruz Azaceta have been addressing the moral and ethical pulse of this country. Early works focused on urban violence, the Aids epidemic, and racism. His current works relate to the rapid state of change in the world at large – war, terrorism, displacement, identity, and collapsing economies.
Azaceta is a devotee of the visual experiment who often develops parallel series in several media at once, combining materials in totally unexpected ways, as with his extended series of photographs mounted on a twisted metal stud. Azaceta works constantly and is extremely prolific.
For Azaceta, art is a way of facing the world. He recognizes that change is inevitable and that all of us are implicated by reality and time passing. The world we inhabit is contingent and changing, and chaos is an inherent part of the process. This is the reality we all share and which we all too often ignore.
He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and has been awarded grants including The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Joan Mitchell Foundation. His work is in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of Art in New York, The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., Museo De Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela, Marco, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico among others.
