Orlando Cuevas

Sculptor/Painter/Mixed Media

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Orlando Cuevas has been exhibiting his paintings and sculptures since 1987.  The art of Orlando Cuevas resonates with paradoxes: it is at once playful and somber, nostalgic and full of foreboding, folksy and complex with political allegory.  His doll houses are haunted by ancestral ghosts, and his chess sets are armies of marauding gargoyles.

As a child, Cuevas preferred making his own toys to playing with the toys that he owned. He would break the toys apart, combining and reassembling the pieces to fashion his own unique objects......products of an unfettered and wondrously irrational imagination. The reassembling and combining of objects, (found, used, or new), with his own hand created forms, It is a technique he sill employs in his work today, save for the addition of an adult’s knowledge and sensibility.

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In 1995  Cuevas received a Master’s degree in Art Education.  He has taught and lectured at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and Montclair State University.  Cuevas served as the Director of the Division of Cultural Affairs for the City of Jersey City for 3 years. He currently teaches art in Jersey City.

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Critical Acclaim and Recognition:

William Zimmer, art critic for the New York Times, writes “in Cuevas' work memories are preserved, every bit the social satirist Cuevas ingeniously models his creatures allegories of power." Dan Bischoff of the Star Ledger writes Cuevas’s artistic style has  versatility and ability to merge influences into a unique aesthetic. 

Art historian, author and critic Dr. Alejandro Anreus, describes Cuevas as a sculptor of the city: "his highly detailed sculptures, drawings, and prints capture the 'inner life' of buildings, the souls of things, and with this, the daily lives of those who inhabit them, those who sleep, and make love, and eat and dream, those who read stories to their children at bedtime, those who pray to God, or die forgotten, those who laugh, yes laugh, in the tenements, in the churches, in the back alleys, in the parks of Jersey City, or any city. Orlando Cuevas is a magician, who in his landscapes and toys, gifts us moments of epiphany."