MICHAEL VASQUEZ
BIO
Michael Vasquez (b. 1983, St. Petersburg, Florida) is an American painter known for large-scale figurative paintings and portraits that explore identity, masculinity, and the cultivation of community with what is at hand. His work centers on young men coming of age amid broken homes and underserved neighborhoods who, in search of acceptance and belonging, transform their friendships into brotherhoods and extended families, shaped and governed by their own streetwise codes and collective values.
Raised as an only child by a single mother, without a father figure, Vasquez was drawn to a subculture where stereotypical, often negative traits of masculinity were perpetuated and affirmed, and where a sense of, or an illusion of, identity, community, and wholeness existed. In his paintings he directs and narrates a cast of characters, drawn from friends and friends of friends, through neighborhood events, mischief, and the trials and tribulations that come with the territory: a slippery, yet pivotal and punctuating period when a sense of inner self and outward, often conflicting perceptions are formed. Through the painted portrait, the timeless visual presentation of identity, his sitters carry dueling feelings of pride and shame, toughness and vulnerability, softness and assertiveness.
Vasquez works from his own photographs and collages, which he translates into drawings enlarged onto canvas. The resulting larger-than-life compositions are energized by both the bravado of his subjects and the application of paint, in a language of mark making that reaches past likeness to capture emotion, attitude, and energy. Within them, color, clothing, hand signs, symbols, and tattoos encode identity, while maps, landmarks, signage, and native Florida foliage establish territory and place.
Vasquez received his BFA from New World School of the Arts in Miami in 2005. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and the MDC Museum of Art + Design, Miami, as well as a solo gallery in Portraiture Now: Staging the Self at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Reviewing that exhibition, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott called his paintings “the most memorable, complex and admirable works” in the show. Vasquez was a finalist in The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, and his work has been exhibited at institutions including the Saatchi Gallery, London; the Orlando Museum of Art; and The Ringling. It was also included in The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, which toured the Baltimore Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Cincinnati Art Museum, and Art Gallery of Ontario. His work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
His paintings are held in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Rubell Museum, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, the Microsoft Art Collection, the Montblanc Cutting Edge Art Collection, and The Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, among many others. He lives and works in Seminole, Florida.