The Great Cannibal
Date 1979
Dimensions 108" x 84" x 84"
Category Installation
Medium Wood, canvas tent painted in acrylic, ink, and oil
Genre Scenes
Period 20th Century
Collection Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico Collection

Rafael Ferrer

"The Great Cannibal" (1979)

Biography

Painter, sculptor, printmaker, performer, professor and musician. He studied music at Syracuse University, N.Y., and in 1952 commenced studies at the University of Puerto Rico, where he was a student of Spanish artist Eugenio Fernández Granell. During those years, he exhibited a series of installations and sculptures that were assembled with discarded materials, which caused great impact for breaking with the refined aesthetics of Puerto Rican art. He settled in Philadelphia during the sixties and seventies and became one of the principal provocateurs of a movement now called “process art” that focused on the process of creation rather than the resulting work. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and on three occasions the scholarship granted by the National Endowment for the Arts (1972, 1978 and 1989). He also has been a professor at several universities in the United States. His work has been presented consistently in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1961 to the present. Collections such as those of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York, have acquired his work. He has been widely recognized as an avant-garde artist, and his work has been associated with Neo Dadaism and anti art.