Francisco Donoso, born in Quito, Ecuador by way of Miami, Florida, holds a BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase and maintains his studio practice in Inwood, NYC. He’s interested in the intersections of art, education and social justice, with a love for youth empowerment.
Francisco was a Van Lier Artist Fellow at Wave Hill and has completed several residencies throughout New York. He believes in the power of art as a tool for social change and personal transformation, and his work maps out ideas of identity formation, displacement and migration. He is currently the Youth Development Associate at Groundswell and a Youth Advocate at the Parsons Scholars Program.
In my recent work I experiment with the language of mapping to explore the psychological and emotional terrain of finding ones way throughout the world. Mapping serves as a metaphor for the journeys taken both physically and metaphysically as an immigrant, and the constant renegotiation between placement and displacement. By using some of the language of cartography, and pushing it into the terrain of abstraction, I am able to question the authority of maps as a voice of truth to reveal their absurdity, mystery and failure to guarantee a sense of place.