Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles) works in the fields of drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and video; often exploring connections between historical events and present-day truths. Invited to Minneapolis by the Walker Art Center and hosted at The Cloud House on Dreamsong’s campus, Edgar Arceneaux has been developing a new body of work in his Skinning the Mirror series at a studio at MCAD since January 2024. The artist paints, shatters and strips salvaged mirrors, transferring their reflective surfaces on to paintings. This process creates tactile gestures that burnish and deepen with age as the silver nitrate absorbs elements of the atmosphere, altering its tone and color until sealed. Deeply personal and rich with metaphoric meaning, Arceneaux’s paintings not only absorb the invisible characteristics of their environs, but in their cracked reflections, materialize the fragmentary nature of self-understanding and the gaps and fissures embedded within broader socio-historical narratives.

Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as The Kitchen, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the Vera List Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria. His work has also been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum, Performa 15, The Whitney Museum, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art in Oslo, Norway, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other venues.

Areneaux's work is represented in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other esteemed collections. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at USC. He attended the California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2001), Fachhochschule Aachen (2000), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1999), and Art Center College of Design (BFA, 1996).