Javier Cambre

Javier Cambre -born Xavier Cambre in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a contemporary artist with dual citizenships from Spain and the USA, working in diverse media such as photography, collage, painting, text and sculpture. His maternal grandfather was the poet Evaristo Ribera Chevremont.
After earning with high honors an Associate Degree in Science and Mathematics, Cambre studied architecture at Universidad de Puerto Rico (B. Design, Magna Cum Laude), Columbia University and at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Dipl. Arquitecto) in Colombia. In 1998 Cambre graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Master of Fine Arts and was awarded a fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study Program, which he decided not to pursue after moving to NYC and spending one week in the program. Nevertheless, 4 years later he was selected to exhibit his work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Cambre is a tenured professor in the Art and Photography department at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York, where he has taught since the year 2000.
Cambre has exhibited his work at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, MoMA-P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the Sculpture Center, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, El Museo del Barrio and the Moore Space in Miami. He has also exhibited his work in museums in Spain, Puerto Rico, Russia and Argentina. Cambre has been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, and at the National Studio Program in P.S. 1/MoMA, as well as artist grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the New Jersey Council on the Artsand the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and has been discussed in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Magazine, Tema Celeste, Sculpture Magazine, Arts Monthly, and Art Nexus among others.

Black Box (published in May 2016; ISBN 9781367851856) is Xavier Cambre's first photo book to be available to the public. Black Box presents a conceptual exploration of the nature of the photographic medium, with a series of eerie and sensuous images created through analog, alternative and digital processes. The book is divided in chapters (Celluloid, Photographic Apparatus, Copies, Marienbad or The Invention of Morel, Minotaur in the Palace of Modernism and Paradise) generating an enigmatic storyboard which playfully undermines within the photographic medium concepts such as abstraction, objecthood, the male gaze, pictorial history and appropriation, modernism, surrealism and an open ended referentiality to cinema and literature. It includes an essay by Tristan Chevremont.

In Vacuus Bacchus (published in November, 2016; ISBN 9781367180246) Cambre explores the relation between Eros and Nothingness with a series of color-tinted black & white photographs, uncanny images of female nudes alternated with empty spaces and Greek statues, which have been subjected to chemical, digital and painterly manipulations. The book includes an essay by A. Coffey.

• 2015 PSC-CUNY Research Grant (Photography), City University of NY
• 2013 PSC-CUNY Research Grant (Photography), City University of NY
• 2011 PSC-CUNY Research Grant (Photography), City University of NY
• 2010 PSC-CUNY Research Grant (Photography), City University of NY
• 2008 PSC-CUNY Research Grant (Video), City University of NY
• 2007 NJ State Council for the Arts Award, Sculpture Fellowship, NJ
• 2007 PSC-CUNY Research Grant (Video), City University of NY
• 2006 PSC-CUNY Research Grant (Video), City University of NY
• 2005 NALAC, Artist Grant- San Antonio, Texas
• 2004 Headlands Center for the Arts- Artist in Residence, Sausalito, Ca
• 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts, Fellowship, NYC
• 2002-03 MoMA-PS1-Contemporary Art Center, Artist in Residence, NYC