Baker Artist Portfolios

Erick Antonio Benitez (b.1988, Bronx, NY) is a Salvadorian-American multidisciplinary artist, musician, organizer and curator based in Baltimore, MD. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has exhibited work at Connor Smith Gallery (DC), The Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Greenpoint Gallery (NY), Real Milk Studios (GA), Gaddis Geeslin Gallery (TX),  Strange Fire Collective (CO), Metafora Studio Arts (Barcelona, ES) and Simultan Festival (Timișoara, RO). His work has been reviewed by The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Magazine, BmoreArt, The American Scholar, Baltimore City Paper, What Weekly and a few publications including the first and sixth issue of BmoreArt Magazine, Let’s Talk Live (WJLA), and Hyrsteria Zine Vol. 2. Benitez is also a recipient of the 2016 Ruby Artist Project grant, The Contemporary: Grit Fund 2, Y.L. Hoi Memorial Award and has work included in private collections around the Mid-Atlantic region and abroad. In 2018, Benitez received the MASB Travel Artist Award, the Janet and Walter Sondheim Award and participated in The Studios residency at MASS MoCA. Recently Benitez has received a Baltimore Light City Festival commission and an invitation to Pigment Sauvage “La Track” residency in Montreal, Canada.

Benitez's work primarily consists of new media installations, video, performance, sound, and painting. Using an array of mediums he engages to explore concepts of identity, culture, mysticism, and the natural world. Using multimedia methods and traveling, as a means of investigation, Benitez combines mediums to examine how all these topics intersect with one another. Much of his current work focuses on multi-nationality and identity, the human condition, and the current state of the natural environment. Benitez's work is a product decadent interactive process, in which he often travels to site-specific locations for references and research to inform his work and studio practice by collecting found objects, field recordings, moving image, and interacting with the public itself.