www.linkedin.com/in/claudiaruizgustafson
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is a Peruvian visual artist based in Framingham, Massachusetts. Her practice includes photography, collage, assemblage, poetry, and artist books. Her heritage and cross-cultural experiences are important influences in her work, which often explores memory, identity, displacement, history, and the ways we see and understand images.
Her latest project, Mi país imaginado / My Imagined Country, explores imperialist and supremacist thinking, the construction of history, the displacement of cultural objects, and the white/colonial gaze. The project brings together photography, collage, writing, book sculptures, slideshows, and installation, incorporating archival materials throughout.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Photographic Resource Center, Concord Art, Newport Art Museum, FotoNostrum Gallery in Barcelona, and in Italy at the Biennale della Fotografia Femminile in Mantua and Millepiani Gallery in Rome. It is held in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Danforth Art Museum, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, where she was also an Artist-in-Residence.
She was a 2022 Fellow at the Houston Center for Photography and received a 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Photography Fellowship. Her projects La ciudad en las nubes and Terra obscura were selected for Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50, and La ciudad en las nubes received the Michael Reichmann Project Grant.
Ruiz Gustafson is also an independent curator and cultural producer who creates exhibitions and community events that bring people together around art, culture, and place. She curated the traveling exhibition Crossing Cultures: Family, Memory and Displacement, recently co-curated The Art of History in Framingham: Medium & Memory at the Framingham History Center, and led This Is Your Plaza / Esta es tu Plaza, a public art project inspired by Latin American plazas.