The main reason I do GoogObits is so I can find out what people did with their lives. Emilio Cruz got quite a bit done.
Emilio Cruz, Artist Known for Dreamlike Imagery, Dies at 66
By KEN JOHNSON
Emilio Cruz a Manhattan painter, writer and performance artist, died on Friday at St. Vincent’s Hospital. He was 66.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Patricia Cruz.
When Mr. Cruz began his career in the 1960’s, he was associated with artists like Lester Johnson, Bob Thompson and Jan Muller, painters who absorbed the formal lessons of Abstract Expressionism but applied them to figurative representational painting. In his paintings, Mr. Cruz mixed human figures, animal and natural history imagery and archaeological references to create dreamlike pictures that often projected dark views of humanity’s violent and destructive tendencies.
A poet and a playwright, Mr. Cruz wrote two plays, “Homeostasis: Once More the Scorpion” and “The Absence Held Fast to Its Presence,” that were produced in 1981 at the Open Eye Theater in New York. The plays were later performed in Europe as part of the World Theater Festival.
Emilio Antonio Cruz Jr. was born in the Bronx on March 15, 1938. He studied art at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research in New York; the University of Louisville in Kentucky; and the Seong Moy School of Painting and Graphics in Provincetown, Mass. His first solo exhibition, at the Zabriskie Gallery in New York in 1963, was followed by many solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. He had museum exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1987 and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1997. His most recent exhibition, “I Am Food I Eat the Eater of Food,” was on view this fall at the Alitash Kebede Gallery in Los Angeles.
In the 1970’s Mr. Cruz lived in Chicago and taught at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. He returned to New York in 1982 and in the late 80’s resumed teaching. At his death he held assistant professorships at both the Pratt Institute and New York University.
In addition to his wife, who is the executive director of Aaron Davis Hall at City College in New York, Mr. Cruz is survived by a son, Dimitri, also of New York.