Berni Ortiz

Berni Ortiz (b. 1954, Martinique) is an Afro-Caribbean artist whose paintings reflect on the experience of living with HIV/AIDS through the lenses of divine grace and acceptance. Rendered in elemental colors on wood substrates, his works embrace a graphic sensibility, intermingling text with Catholic iconography—such as the figures of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Christ Child—in mesmerizing fields of pattern. After the tradition of a monk studying devotional imagery, he sometimes replicates existing effigies; his work St. Luc (1994), for example, recreates a page from a seventeenth-century Ethiopian manuscript in which two disciples and two Abyssinian ground hornbills flank St. Luke the Evangelist. 

Ortiz has studied painting at institutions world - wide and has been exhibited across the US. While living for a time in San Francisco, he was a member of Visual Aid—an organization distinct from Visual AIDS—which exhibited his work frequently. His paintings have also been shown in a Coptic Orthodox Church in his native Martinique. 

He currently lives and works in Bridgeport, Connecticut.