Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is a Peruvian artist based in Massachusetts. Her practice engages photography, collage, assemblage, poetry and artist book-making. Her cross-cultural experience and Peruvian heritage deeply inform her artwork.
Ruiz Gustafson’s latest trilogy project, Mi país imaginado / My Imagined Country, explores themes of imperialist/supremacist thinking and its construction of histories, the displacement of cultural objects, as well as photography and the white/colonial gaze. Mi país imaginado encompasses photography, collages, writing, book sculptures, slideshows and installation, all which incorporate archival elements.
In 2022, she was an Artist-In-Residence at the Centre for Photography at Woodstock and a Fellow at the Houston Center for Photography. Other honors include a 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Photography Fellowship. Her recent project, La ciudad en las nubes, was selected as a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 and received the Michael Reichmann Project Grant Award.
Ruiz Gustafson has exhibited internationally, she has received grants and awards from the PX3 de la Photographie Paris, The Gala Awards, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cambridge Art Association, and L.A. Photo Curator: Global Photography Awards.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Centre for Photography at Woodstock. Ruiz Gustafson's work has been published in Fraction Media, Black & White Magazine, F-Stop Magazine, Lenscratch, Artscope Magazine, The Boston Globe, among others.
Since 2019, she is the curator and participating artist of the traveling exhibition Crossing Cultures: Family, Memory and Displacement, a multi-media project made up of artwork created by multi-cultural artists reflecting on identity and diaspora.
Email: [email protected]