Member Artists

Adrián Tió Díaz

Hare of the Dog • Studio and Press

The artist was born 1951 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to parents who had emigrated from the Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico. Tió received his fine arts training from Temple University (BA 74) and the University of Cincinnati (MFA 79), and studied with the Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy (1975-76). The artist has exhibited nationally as well as regionally in drawing, painting, and printmaking for nearly 30 years, and has conducted workshops on mural painting, paper making and the book arts. Residing in New Bedford, Tió serves as Dean of the College Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth.

Counting Sheep, linocut printed letterpress
 

Artist's Statement

I have always felt torn between two cultures—the suburban middle-class objectivity of my American birth, and the passionate sensitivity of my Latino heritage. I am of direct Puerto Rican decent, but was born in the Mid-West, and have never lived extensively in Puerto Rico. Most of my life has been spent in middle-class America; the suburbs are my barrio, and English is my language. Without an ability to communicate in Spanish as well, I have become culturally shy of my own ethnicity. My interest in bright color, rhythmic patterning and expressive figurative imagery, combined with mixed media, including oil pastels, charcoal, conté, and acrylic washes on paper, provides a fresh interpretation to events and individuals that I have come into contact with. Recent studio developments in experimental techniques in printmaking, papermaking, and the book arts that include bilingual text, offer a new visual format that seeks to communicate to a broader audience. I have found that the visual arts have long been a significant part of Latino culture, providing a visible means of communicating social consciousness and reawakened self-esteem. A good deal of my time has been spent in developing a bivisual means of communicating to both cultures through my artwork. The works are hybrids; they combine elements of both mainstream America and exotic Hispania. Through these works, I attempt to reach out to my Latino past in a concerted effort to expand and enrich my American identity.

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