“Nina Johnson is pleased to present Off the Shelf. The exhibition features more than thirty works created over two decades, and highlights Miguel Ferrando’s experimental and imaginative approach to landscape, portraiture, and still life, while creating a visual language that reflects both sides of the Atlantic and his role as interpreter of multilingual, pluralistic societies full of juxtapositions, namely New York City and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Ferrando migrated to New York City in 1962, at the age of five, but returned frequently to the Dominican Republic, where the city of Santo Domingo, and smaller towns like Las Terrenas were integral to his practice. His body of work reveals a fluid sensibility that oscillates between oceans and languages, anchored by a rigorous citation practice invested in marking the stylistically innovative techniques born of Caribbean modernism. Additionally, Ferrando admired and often referenced canonical European artists ranging from Caravaggio to Velázquez to El Greco. Yet, like the late-nineteenth-century Puerto Rican maestro Francisco Oller, Ferrando refused to adhere to any single European style and instead synthesized realism, impressionism, naturalism, and neo-impressionism into a distinctly Caribbean visual language.
Having trained at the Escuela de Bellas Artes with Guillo Pérez, Ferrando represents a transitional link between different generations of Dominican artists. He carries the legacy of the generation working during Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930–1961). That generation often resorted to visual strategies like abstraction, symbolism, and tenebrism, since they were often unable to critique the socio-economic and political conditions of the island openly. In New York, Ferrando found his place within the queer downtown art scene. He lived in the Lower East Side and performed drag at the Pyramid Club. He belonged to a tight knit circle of artist friends including Darrel Ellis, Richard Brintzenhofe, Allen Frame, Malcolm Morley, and Ann Wilson.
Although Ferrando’s life was cut short at thirty-eight by AIDS-related causes, his intervention in the field of contemporary Dominican art and its diaspora is significant. His work has nonetheless been largely absent from those discussions. Yet, he shares with artists like Tony Capellán, Raúl Recio, and Freddy Rodríguez a set of recurring themes: the natural environment, Christian iconography and its relationship to political power structures, and Dominican and U.S. vernacular culture. His visual lexicon was informed by the culture, sound, and landscape of the Caribbean and the kaleidoscopic environment of Manhattan.
Dominican scholar Lorgia García-Peña argues that the condition of in-betweenness central to Dominican-New York subjectivity emphasizes the notion that once a person is an immigrant, they ‘will only be defined by the action of leaving, moving, and never fully belonging to a location.’ Yet for some artists, this condition, rather than being a site of deprivation, becomes fertile soil, liberating to the Dominican subject and revealing new pathways capable of creating a nation of their own making. The term dominicanos ausentes, or ‘absent Dominicans,’ which generally refers to Dominicans living outside the country and has been in common use since the 1980s, is a useful container for thinking through the tensions that shape Ferrando’s oeuvre. Dominicanos ausentes aptly signals the transnational nature of Dominicans who live elsewhere yet are still considered part of the nation. At the same time, ausente functions as a metaphor for the tangled position Dominican migrants inhabit within both nations that define them.
Ferrando renders this tension in Untitled (Statue of Liberty, NYC), and Las Terrenas, against a vibrant yellow background, Caribbean motifs are juxtaposed with one of the most legible monuments of U.S. arrival, the Statue of Liberty. In San Lázaro, a statue of the saint is set in the foreground of a flushed background of layered swatches of dark blue, red, and green. A partial face is visible underneath the statue, and the two dogs standing beside the saint are gesturally rendered. San Lázaro is the patron saint for healing, severe illnesses, and protection. In the Dominican Republic, four-inch San Lázaro statues are commonly found glued to the tops of dashboards in vehicles, placed there to shield the driver from harm. This imagery is recognizable to people who have spent time on the island, and it appears just as often inside the vehicles of Dominican cab drivers in New York City.
Ferrando’s compositions destabilize tropical fantasies and insist on the in-between. He conjures the distance itself, embracing a geographic–temporal flux and claiming it as not only habitable but a place of rich possibility.” – Words by Naiomy Guerrero
Miguel Ferrando: Off the Shelf is on view through November 14, 2026, in the Upstairs Gallery.
