Miguel Ferrando Through Time and Space

Miguel Ferrando was born in 1957 in Santo Domingo, the capital and largest city of the Dominican Republic. The country occupies the eastern side of the island Quisqueya, meaning “mother of all lands” in the Indigenous Taíno language; the island was renamed Hispaniola (“little Spain”) by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Dominican Republic has earned the sobriquet “the cradle of the Americas,” as it is home to the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the New World. The arrival of European colonists to Quisqueya marked the beginning of the modern era, introducing systems of production rooted in conquest and plantation economies that shaped the Americas as we know them today. 

Ferrando did not just grow up learning this history. He lived it, walked it, even touched it. The artist’s childhood home was in La Ciudad Colonial (“the colonial city”), located in Santo Domingo’s southern sprawl. There, streets were lined with colonial-era stone structures, centuries-old churches, and Spanish-style town squares. Some of Ferrando’s first memories were of these visual wonders. A stroll through “La Zona,” as locals still call it, revealed the Cathedral Basilica of Santa María la Menor, the first cathedral in the Americas; the Alcázar de Colón, former home of Columbus; and the Altar de la Patria, the resting place of the Dominican Republic’s founding fathers. In La Zona, each step on the cobblestone streets carried the whispers of history—a conversation between its colonial past and nascent national identity. 

Ferrando’s family was of mixed European heritage: his mother was Dominican of Spanish Puerto Rican descent, and his father was Dominican of Spanish and Genoese descent. Neighboring their old colonial-style home was that of the Dominican Abstract Expressionist painter Guillo Pérez, whose explosive colors recall the Dominican countryside through hot, melting brushstrokes. While they were neighbors, Pérez worked on his “Rooster” series, a collection of paintings depicting one of the most recognizable symbols of Dominican masculinity. Day in and day out, young Ferrando sat and watched Pérez paint these birds, the color on the canvas juxtaposed with the bleached, centuries-old buildings that surrounded them. 

The Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti to the west, which in 1804 became the first free Black republic in the Americas. Eighteen years later, Haitian troops led by President Jean-Pierre Boyer marched into Santo Domingo, unifying the island under one government. As the leader of a young nation, Boyer sought to minimize foreign threats to Haitian sovereignty and maintain the abolition of slavery across all of Quisqueya. Unsatisfied with the new government, the Dominicans gained sovereignty in 1844 and almost a century later, saw the rise of one of the twentieth century’s most brutal dictators: Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, known mononymously as Trujillo. Like other early-twentieth-century populist dictators, Trujillo oversaw the rapid development of industry and infrastructure in the Dominican Republic, while maintaining a brutally repressive regime marked by forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. As a justification for particularly rampant anti-Haitian violence, Trujillo invoked the Haitian occupation; he painted an image of a Dominican Republic that was European and Catholic, in contrast with Haiti, which was Black and religiously syncretic. The construction of Dominican identity, especially as informed by the hegemonies of the state and the church, later became a recurring theme in Ferrando’s work. 

The rise of the Trujillo regime was consequential for the Ferrando family. Ferrando’s father was the proprietor of a small fleet of trucks that transported goods throughout the Dominican Republic. With the regime came a dramatic increase in the cost of vehicle registration, which Ferrando’s father vocally critiqued. After being threatened at gunpoint by a Trujillo guard, Ferrando’s father was left with no choice but to leave the Dominican Republic. Ferrando’s mother immigrated first, and his father followed in 1963, bringing Ferrando with him.

Living on Seventeenth Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, Ferrando was welcomed to a city completely unlike his native Santo Domingo. At the time, Chelsea was still a working-class neighborhood, home to Puerto Rican and Irish immigrants. As a teenager, Ferrando started at the High School of Fashion Industries in Chelsea circa 1971, where he was newly surrounded by the dynamic downtown art scene. There, he met Darrel Ellis, who became a lifelong friend and artistic collaborator.

In the early seventies, New York City saw the nascent political self-actualization of transgender, lesbian, and gay communities, particularly in the shadow of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Chelsea in particular became home to burgeoning gay and lesbian communities that moved north as the Village grew less affordable. Gay bars like the Eagle, the Spike, and the Ramp opened and quickly became community staples. Despite this growing visibility, gay psychotherapist and then-Chelsea-resident Michael Shernoff remembers that queer people veered past Eighth Avenue to avoid the threat of gay bashings. In response to this ongoing menace, Chelsea’s queer community developed a number of gay defense coalitions, including the Pink Panthers and the Society to Make America Safe for Homosexuals (SMASH). Markedly, Ferrando’s queer identity evolved alongside that of his neighborhood: by the time Ferrando left high school, Chelsea was a queer hotspot. Ferrando continued to grapple with these ideas of violence, community, and rebellion in his art, drawing upon the political violence that forced his family’s emigration to New York and the precariousness he encountered again as a queer person once there.

After high school and in between art classes at Cooper Union and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Ferrando yearned to reconnect with his Dominican community and to reconcile his childhood memories with political reality. He chose to return to his native Dominican Republic to paint. Ferrando arrived in Santo Domingo in the early-to-mid seventies to study at La Escuela de Bellas Artes, only a mile from where, as a child, he had watched Guillo Pérez paint roosters in oranges, browns, and reds. At Bellas Artes, he met Pérez again, this time as a teacher and mentor. This reencounter with the landscape and landmarks of the Dominican Republic would define Ferrando’s mode of expressing social and political histories through painting. 

For example, in an untitled and undated sketch with a cluster of abstract shapes, a pair of young men turn toward one another. The first character has brown hair and brown skin. He smiles at the second character, who is white and blond and does not return the other man’s happy expression. The piece underscores an interest in depicting the tacit tension of romance. A slim, green rectangle frames the two men to their left, and below them is an abstract orange-red object, rectilinear on two sides and uneven on a diagonal edge. The object invites various interpretations: a continental mass, a shard of stained glass, or a torn sheet of red paper. Through a geographic reading, the red object is reminiscent of the borders of a nondescript nation or continent, offering a macroscopic geopolitical interpretation of the intimacy and friction between the two men. The red also suggests blood, an apt symbol of both fraternity and violence. Against those foreboding omens, a lion that sits atop the red object is reminiscent of a heraldic charge, perhaps an evocation of the good-luck charms Ferrando kept close.

The blend of times and spaces that appears in Ferrando’s sketches also defines his larger-scale works on paper. In Untitled (Colonialism Monument: Monumento a los Héroes de la Restauración, Santiago) (ca. 1981–82), a dozen figures roam a barren hill before the Monumento a los Héroes de la Restauración (“Monument to the Heroes of the Restoration”), a readily recognizable memorial in Santiago de los Caballeros and one of the most famous in the Dominican Republic. Constructed by Trujillo in 1944, the monument was originally called El Monumento a la Paz de Trujillo (or “the Monument to Trujillo’s Peace”) and marked a century of independence from Haiti. At its origin, the monument symbolized the Trujillista vision for the island; in Ferrando’s scene, it conjures the Spanish colonists and slavery, drawing an explicit continuity between the Dominican Republic’s colonial past and the interests of the Trujillo regime.

The crowd that stands before the monument underscores Trujillo’s emphatically Western narrative of Dominican history. To the left, a woman wears a black gown with an Elizabethan ruff, a particularly uncomfortable costume in the scorching Dominican heat. The scene’s only Black individual shields her from the sun with a red parasol. A crowd of women attired in Renaissance fashion moves behind these central figures, as if conjured from a sixteenth-century ballroom. These standards of colonial dress, as impractical as they may have been, persisted in fashion as symbols of status and wealth in the New World. Anachronistically, Ferrando drew together symbols of the dictator and the colonial government to suggest the comparably repressive political supremacy exercised by each. Rebuffing Trujillo’s enthusiasm for a Western heritage, Ferrando critically depicted European sensibilities through a Caribbean gaze.

In Ferrando’s My Father Likes It (Colonialism Monument: Iglesia Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, Moca, D.R.) (ca. 1981–82), the violence of colonialism again mars the serene Caribbean landscape. Yellow warplanes—redolent of the insistent hum of war—circle the Iglesia Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Moca, a city in the north of the Dominican Republic. Opposite the planes, three angels descend upon a scene of earthly violence: crucifixions, wounded figures, and half-buried bodies. An Adam-like figure moves in the foreground with a fig leaf over his loins, while another stands in contrapposto, evoking the agony of Saint Sebastian. Ferrando populated Moca with scenes from the Bible, creating a sense of tangible, audible chaos and presenting victims of present-day violence as martyrs and saints.

As in Untitled (Colonialism Monument), figures from a Western past throng under the impassive eye of a culturally significant structure—in this case, a church is the watchful spectator of gruesome acts. The piece invites us to confront religion as a vehicle for violence, an interpretation underscored by the repetition of crucifixion scenes in the painting’s foreground. It is another example of superimposing atemporal and aspatial subjects across a common background, drawing figures from biblical legends, colonial memory, and contemporary war into conversation with one another. After all, Quisqueya was the entry point of Catholicism into the Americas. Ferrando painted a conversation between the church—a material structure—and the beliefs that buttress it.