Michael participated as a Visual Art Fellow for AVR2 (August 2020). Click here to see Michael’s program.

Michael Paul Britto’s interdisciplinary practice spans a broad scope of mediums from videos to digital photography, sculpture, collage, and performance. He has a BA from the City College, NY. His past residencies include: The New Museum, Smack Mellon, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation and LMCC. He has exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum of Harlem and The Kitchen in (NY) as well as internationally at The Zacheta National Gallery (Warsaw), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). Britto has been written about in The New York Times, Art In America and The Brooklyn Rail. He is also a teaching artist, and the co-founder of the “Young Men Of Color” film / video training program at Downtown Community Television in New York City. 

My work is most concerned with the misconceptions and assumptions communicated by mass media in The United States. My practice creates a platform where I can address political and cultural awareness, using the customary, as metaphor. I encourage the viewer to think about socially nurtured assumptions of blackness, poverty, youth, and the characteristics of acceptable behavior, to create a perspective that is more responsive than reactionary. By appropriating the appropriated (i.e. pop culture) and mining historical references, I believe that my messages resonate from a globally shared influence of “American” culture.
Michael Paul Britto