info [at] alejandroacierto [dot] com
bio
alejandro t. acierto produces creative projects, exhibitions, and performances that highlight the impact of colonial legacies across technologies, material culture, and the environment. Working within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, he has presented projects and screenings for the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Issue Project Room (NYC), MCA Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Echo Park Film Center (LA), Stove Works (Chattanooga) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham, UK), among others. He has presented multimedia performance works for the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival (Chicago), High Zero Festival (Baltimore), the KANEKO (Omaha), and The Quarantine Concerts for ESS Chicago. Additionally, his curatorial projects have been mounted at Stove Works (Chattanooga), Tipton Gallery at East Tennessee State University (Johnson City), Vanderbilt University’s Space 204 and Coop (both Nashville), as well as online for the Wrong Biennial.
acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists' Coalition, and Digital Artist Residency. A 3Arts Awardee, he received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from the University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He was also a Core Faculty Fellow at Warren Wilson College in the MA for Critical Craft Studies and a Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media at Vanderbilt University and held a Digital Humanities Faculty Fellowship at the Center for Digital Humanities. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Art at Wayne State University located in Waawiyaataanong on the ceded lands of the Three Fires Confederacy, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot peoples.
statement
In my work as a queer artist and media maker of color, I produce creative projects, exhibitions, and performances that highlight the impact of colonial legacies across technologies, material culture, and the environment. Often, I engage performance, installation, expanded lens-based media, sound, and artist publications to speak to the inherent entanglements of power embedded within and across infrastructures of knowledge.
Within these investigations, my work is often animated by gestures of failure that attend to the ways disruption and rupture can become productive components that speak to power. Unsophisticated technologies, broken systems, and noisy and/or blurred media become critical components of my work that help trace how these histories are told, the mechanisms of their safekeeping, and the ways history’s ephemera reveal themselves across interfaces.