Oscar Rene Cornejo is an artist who was born in Houston, Texas, and splits his time between New York and western Massachusetts. With a background in pedagogy and activism, Cornejo’s socially engaged practice draws together histories of abstraction in the U.S. and Latin America with personal experiences of the construction site, family memory, and historical forgetting. He earned an MFA from Yale School of Art, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in El Salvador. In 2004, he cofounded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad), where for seven years he directed artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through community art education. He is a founding member of Junte Adjuntas, an artist project based in Adjuntas, a town in the mountains of southern Puerto Rico.
Cornejo’s work has been included in exhibitions at Radiator Gallery, The Queens Museum, Recess: Assembly, Princeton University, and Diverseworks, among other venues. He has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, and Yvonne Residency in Guatemala. Cornejo taught at the Cooper Union, Hunter College, and Yale School of Art’s Painting and Printmaking Department. He is an Assistant Professor for Art at Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and is a Fresco Instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
