Isabel Nazario, Julio Nazario, Rodríguez Calero
Gallery Opening: Saturday, September 7 • 3-5pm
These three artists have distinguished careers in the visual arts. The three work from a consciousness of their Puerto Rican heritage, using it to interrogate issues of immigration, cultural crossover, violence, and place. The three represent the strong presence and impact of New Jersey’s Latinx cultural community.
Isabel Nazario is a visual artist living in Highland Park, NJ and in Kingston NY. She was born in Puerto Rico and raised both in the Island and in the South Bronx NYC. She attended the High School of Music and Art and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Queens College, CUNY, where she taught Caribbean art history courses. Over the years she worked in museum education, managed a community art gallery in the Queens Museum of Art, and was an associate in the museum program in New York State Council on the Arts. She retired from Rutgers University as the Associate Vice President for Strategic Diversity Initiatives in the Arts, and Humanities, a post that she held since 2004. In the university she had oversight responsibility for the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities and for twelve years, beginning in 1992 she was the founding director of the Rutgers Center for Latino Arts and Culture. She and her husband, Julio Nazario now have a gallery in Kingston, NY but still consider New Jersey their home base.
Julio Nazario is a graduate of Mason Gross School of Arts, Rutgers University with an M.F.A. in Visual Arts and Queens College (CUNY) with a B.A. in Philosophy He is an artist working primarily in black and white photography. He was Instructor of Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City for ten years and an adjunct associate professor at La Guardia Community College (CUNY) for 17 years. He served in the Vietnam War and was awarded the Purple Heart. Julio Nazario retired from Rutgers Universityh where he worked as Assistant Dean for Outreach, Special Initiatives and Assessment in the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program for 20 years.
Rodríguez Calero studied at the Puerto Rican Instituto de Cultura, Escuela de Artes Plasticas and continued her studies at the Art Students League of New York. She has received awards, honors, fellowships, and grants from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2015 she had her solo exhibit, Urban Martyrs + Latter Day Santos at El Museo del Barrio. Rodríguez is best known for Acrollage, her signature style of painting, a form of printmaking and mixed media combination of acrylic paint, and paper.
