Ernesto Pujol
2025 Stepping Stone Grantee
Bio
Ernesto Pujol's long multidisciplinary practice has encompassed a wide range, handling art as a genealogy of flexible mediums at the cultural service of the challenges facing the human condition. Starting as a narrative painter of colonial taxonomies during the 1980s, his visual gestures evolved into full-immersion installations as critical architectural manifestations of the construction of queer masculinity against the abuses of patriarchy. By the late 1990s, Pujol had transformed into a durational public performance artist and entered the new millennium as a large-scale social choreographer, working with vulnerable communities and landscapes under threat. The last two decades find him engaged in environmentalism as a horticultural rewilder and experimental educator, founding The Listening School and writing to reform American art education.
Artwork details
Systems of Weight
, 2014Performance (Walking sample)By the second day, the long canvas bags were torn and began to spread their sand as a cathartic metaphor of psychic release. This created a wide river of sand which acted as an installation afterwards. Toward closure, the audience began to walk with the performers, as sandbags were available to them.
Time After US
, 2013Performance (Group Detail)Fragment of the larger group walking the circle under the natural light of large windows. All walkers were barefoot.
Time After US
, 2013Performance (Entrance to Space)40 performers ringing their individual entrances to begin walking a giant circle in silence, counterclockwise and backwards (undoing time), at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church for an uninterrupted 24 hours. Commissioned by the Crossing the Line Festival, French Institute/Alliance Française, NY.
The Listeners #2
, 2018Performance (Street Listening Sample)12 performers listening as public servants for 3 days to pedestrians as a manifestation of The Listening School part of the project, first across the city, and later culminating in an evening listening circle sited at the Washington Memorial. Commissioned by The River to River Festival of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY
The Listeners #1
, 2016Performance (Listening Sample)Listeners engaged with participants inside The Peace Hall, where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, ending The Thirty Years War. Docents brought them in and they selected a listener, who later walked them out after the empathic e×change.
Systems of Weight, 2014. Performance (Walking sample). By the second day, the long canvas bags were torn and began to spread their sand as a cathartic metaphor of psychic release. This created a wide river of sand which acted as an installation afterwards. Toward closure, the audience began to walk with the performers, as sandbags were available to them..
