Juan Alonso-Rodríguez is a Cuban-born, self-taught artist whose career spans over three decades in the Pacific Northwest before relocating to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2022. His work, rooted in abstraction, is widely exhibited across the United States and is held in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Museum of Northwest Art, Microsoft, and General Mills, among others. Alonso-Rodríguez has also contributed to numerous public art projects, including commissions for Lumen Link Field, Sea-Tac Airport, King County Housing Authority, Sound Transit, and Renton Technical College. A recipient of multiple prestigious awards, he has been honored with the 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship, the 1997 Neddy Fellowship, a 2010 Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award, the 2016 DeJunius Hughes Award for Activism, and the 2017 Conductive Garboil Grant. He received the 2019 Governor’s Arts Award for an Individual Artist and was the 2021 Lecturer for the UW Libraries Artist Images. He has also been nominated twice for the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant. Beyond his artistic practice, Alonso-Rodríguez is a passionate advocate for the arts, particularly for underrepresented artists. He has played a pivotal role in fostering business training programs for artists and has served as a Seattle Arts Commissioner, a member of the Public Art Advisory Committee, and a board member of ARTE NOIR, a non-profit dedicated to showcasing Black artists. At Drew Marc Gallery, Alonso-Rodríguez’s latest body of work delves into memories of his childhood in Cuba, evoking themes of nostalgia, resilience, and belonging. His compositions often reference the horizon and the layers within the Earth—metaphors for time, displacement, and the unseen forces that shape identity. Artist Statement:My work is an ongoing exploration of form, color, and memory, deeply informed by my personal history and my Cuban heritage. While abstraction serves as my primary language, my paintings and mixed-media pieces are imbued with narratives of displacement, transformation, and the passage of time. Through layered textures, shifting planes, and nuanced color fields, I reflect on the landscapes—both physical and emotional—that have shaped my life. The horizon, a recurring element in my work, represents both a literal and symbolic threshold, speaking to the tension between past and future, rootedness and movement. Layers within the Earth mirror the complexities of memory, history, and identity, revealing hidden depths beneath seemingly simple surfaces. At Drew Marc Gallery, my current series reimagines fragments of my Cuban childhood through an abstract lens, filtering recollections of light, atmosphere, and geography into visual meditations on belonging. In each piece, I strive to create a space that is both personal and universal—a space where nostalgia and possibility converge. Art, for me, is more than a practice; it is a means of connection, advocacy, and resilience. Through my work, I aim to engage viewers in a dialogue about memory, migration, and the unseen forces that shape our sense of place in the world.