Chat Travieso is a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, and educator. His public art works have been commissioned by or organized in collaboration with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Lower East Side Waterfront Alliance, The Architectural League of New York, Design Trust for Public Space, the NYC Department of Transportation, and the Cambridge Arts Council. He has worked as a teaching artist with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Hester Street Collaborative. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Designboom, and BOMB Magazine as well as recently published books Pop-Up City: City-making In a Fluid World (BIS Publishers, 2014) and Supernew Supergraphics (Unit Editions, 2014). He is the recipient of a Community Arts Fund Grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Moulton Andrus Award and the Harvey R. Russel Scholarship from the Yale School of Architecture, and the F. Grainger Marburg Traveling Award from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.Arch from the Yale School of Architecture. Chat Travieso will be a recipient of a 2015-2016 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship as part of his Smack Mellon Studio Program residency.
View more of Chat’s work at www.chattravieso.com
I create playful and functional urban interventions and public art projects that create or reinforce social bonds in our public spaces. Working closely with local residents, businesses, and community groups in various stages of a project, my work considers ways cities can be more open to communities that are often excluded from dominant systems of urban development by offering uplifting and visually striking responses to people’s everyday needs. This work rethinks our surroundings as places that are endlessly adaptable and have the potential for multiple uses. It is intended to question our assumptions of the spaces around us, and rethink how the city can be a more just place.
