Few artists today embody the urgent call of environmentalism as powerfully as Rimer Cardillo. The Uruguayan-American artist has spent over fifty years building a body of work that mourns, warns, and ultimately inspires. His art connects directly to the idea of Deep Ecology, a philosophy that insists we can no longer separate human survival from the survival of all living things. For Cardillo, this is no abstract theory. His work traces a lineage from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the extinction of plants and animals, as well as the destruction of the earth’s ecosystems. It is a continuum of loss, but also a call to recognize that all life is interconnected. Since his student days in Uruguay during the late 1960s, Cardillo has used his art to memorialize what has vanished and warn of what could still disappear. The result is a haunting, beautiful, and deeply ethical visual language. The works on view at the North Dakota Museum of Art include multi-media sculptures, photographic installation, and selected sketchbooks highlighting the artists observational skills.
Cardillo studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo, the Berlin Weibensee School of Art, and the Leipzig School of Graphic Arts. He has lived in the US since 1979 and taught printmaking at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Cardillo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, represented Uruguay at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. His work is held in many private and public collections around the world.
In addition to the exhibition at NDMOA, this exhibition unfolds across five institutions in eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota, each offering a distinct lens on Cardillo’s career