Raul De Nieves

Raúl de Nieves (born in 1983 in Michoacán, Mexico) is a contemporary artist, performer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he learned to sew and crochet. At the age of nine, he left for the United States with his mother and two brothers, and the family settled in San Diego. He gave up on art school and taught himself, in San Francisco.

He has developed a multidisciplinary practice combining sculpture, painting, installation and performance. His work relies on simple materials (plastic beads, sequins, fabric, worn shoes, everyday objects) which he turns into highly ornamental and colourful works.

His visual language draws on Mexican culture, Catholic traditions, theatre, carnival and the queer and punk scenes. In this way he builds a personal iconography centred on transformation, in which the body and identity keep returning.

He has exhibited in major institutions, including the Whitney Biennial (2017), where he presented a faux stained-glass window, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, which devoted "The Treasure House of Memory" to him in 2021. In 2023, his faux stained glass made of acetate and tape covered the skylights of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. In 2025, Pioneer Works presented "In Light of Innocence", his first solo exhibition at a New York institution, where he installed fifty panels drawn from tarot imagery. The Whitney Museum of American Art and MOCA Los Angeles hold his work in their collections.