Adrian R. Tio: the printmaker between two cultures

1974 - present

The start: Adrian R. Tio was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to parents who had emigrated from Puerto Rico, and his own account of his formation is the rare one that names the tension plainly: torn between the suburban middle-class objectivity of his American birth and the passionate sensitivity of his Latino heritage. "Most of my life has been spent in middle-class America," he writes. "The suburbs are my barrio, and English is my primary language." Printmaking, often with bilingual text, became the form that could hold both.

The career: He took his bachelor's at Temple University in 1974, studied with Temple's Tyler School of Art in Rome in 1975-76, and his master's in fine art at the University of Cincinnati in 1979. He has exhibited in printmaking, drawing, and painting for over fifty years, run workshops in mural painting, papermaking, and the book arts, and held grants and awards from Arts Midwest and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Ohio Arts Council, and others. The teaching ran parallel to the prints: professor of fine arts at Bowling Green State University, Indiana State University, Northern Illinois University, and finally the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from which he is retired.

The standing: His work sits in collections that map the two cultures back onto each other: the Rockefeller Foundation, the White House, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts on one side of the water, the Ateneo Puertorriqueno in San Juan on the other. He lives in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, and works at his Hare of the Dog Press and Studio in New Bedford. Fort Wayne's line in his biography is the first one, as with Nauman and Scott, and it is also the subject of the work: the Midwestern birthplace is not an accident in his prints, it is half the material. His birth year is not published in his own biography, and the leg does not infer one from his degrees.

Sources:

1. The artist's biography and statement (adrianrtio.com) (born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to parents who emigrated from Puerto Rico; Temple 1974, Tyler in Rome 1975-1976, Cincinnati M.F.A. 1979; fifty years of exhibiting; the workshops; the grants; the four faculties; the collections, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the White House, the Warhol Foundation, and the Ateneo Puertorriqueno; the Hare of the Dog Press; the statement's "the suburbs are my barrio").