Roberto Visani

Roberto Visani is a multi-media artist residing  in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Bronx Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Barbican Galleries. Visani has been awarded residencies from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Chelsea College of Art and Abrons Art Center. He is a NYFA Fellow in Sculpture and was a Fulbright Fellow to Ghana.  His work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Art Forum, Art News, and Frieze among others.  Since 2004 he has taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where he is an associate professor of art.  

Visani's sculptures reference the African diaspora and transatlantic artifacts and archives as a form of comparative history. Within the body of work titled Primary Structures, the artist reconsiders stylized indigenous representations of the human form, specifically West African figurative sculpture and its relationship to modernism and 3D modeling. Through a combination of analog and digital methods, these works re-orient misplaced ideas of primitivism through a metamorphosis, translating code into cardboard and cast metal and adding layers of meaning throughout the process. The sculptures, cast in iron, bronze, and aluminum, suggest an enduring legacy of cultural expression while employing digital fabrication as a generative tool. This juxtaposition of traditional and technology explores the anonymity that our digital world engenders and how identity interfaces with it.