The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Purchase Award
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson (lives Massachusetts) has a BA in Communications from Universidad de Lima, Peru and a Professional Photography Certificate from Kodak Interamericana de Peru, Lima. She has exhibited in museums and galleries across the U.S. and abroad, including at the Photographic Resource Center, Cambridge, MA; Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, MA; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; Agora Gallery, New York, NY; Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA; and Galleria Valid Foto, Barcelona, Spain. She has received grants and awards from the Cambridge Art Association, The Gala Awards, L.A. Photo Curator: Global Photography Awards, Mass Cultural Council and PX3 de la Photographie Paris. She was a 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Photography Fellow and in the 2021 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50. Also in 2021, “La Ciudad en las Nubes” received the Michael Reichmann Project Grant Award. Her work has been published in Aspect Initiative, Float Photo Magazine, Fraction Media, Black & White Magazine, F-Stop Magazine and Lenscratch. She is the curator and a participating artist of the traveling exhibition Crossing Cultures: Family, Memory and Displacement, a multi-media project reflecting on identity and diaspora.
Statement from the Artist:
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is a Peruvian Latinx visual artist and curator whose practice engages photography, assemblage, poetry and artist books. Her work is mainly autobiographical and self-reflective; her cross-cultural experience and Peruvian heritage deeply inform her art making. Ruiz Gustafson’s projects explore the stories of her Peruvian ancestors and aspects of her immigrant and liminal experiences. In “Mi País Imaginado,” she is in dialogue with historical extractivist events, reframing and recontextualizing those narratives within a contemporary gaze while exposing the mechanisms of the imperialist machine that made them possible.