Rafael Ferrer, a 1993 Pew Fellow and conceptual artist whose practice spanned mediums including painting, sculpture, collage, and performance, died on September 27, 2026. He was 93.
Ferrer’s vibrant and eclectic style drew on movements from Surrealism and Dada to Expressionism and Minimalism, and he incorporated a range of uncommon materials into his installations and sculptures, including paper bags, maps, gourds, and garbage can lids. His 1970 piece 50 Cakes of Ice left 300-pound blocks of ice to melt in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Ferrer credited his time as a drummer in Afro-Caribbean jazz bands in the 1950s New York scene with developing a skill for improvisation that served him in the visual art world. In a 2013 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, he said, “I have always believed that the doing is what is exciting. My earlier life as a musician created in my psyche a sense that what you do is dictated by the needs of the moment, all within a repertoire. It’s not about repetition—it’s about the challenge of the moment.”
Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1933, Ferrer was educated at Syracuse University. He later studied painting at the University of Puerto Rico with Surrealist artist Eugenio Fernández Granell and first showed his paintings and sculptures in Puerto Rico in the early 1960s. Ferrer went on to create work inspired by the post-minimalist and process art movements and garnered attention for guerrilla works like 50 Cakes of Ice, as well as Three Leaf Pieces, which filled three Manhattan galleries with truckloads of dried leaves. In the ’70s, he created public art installations including the monumental archway Puerto Rican Sun in the South Bronx and El Gran Teatro de la Luna, installed at Fairhill Square Park in Philadelphia.
Ferrer moved to Philadelphia in 1967 and taught at Philadelphia College of Art (later known as the University of the Arts) until 1977. He also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, with stints at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Tyler School of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design.
His work is held in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Additionally, he has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and he had a major solo exhibition at New York’s El Museo del Barrio in 2010. In observing his passing, El Museo del Barrio called Ferrer “a groundbreaking artist whose singular and influential practice challenged boundaries across painting, sculpture, collage, drawing, photography, installation, and mixed media.”
In addition to his Pew Fellowship, Ferrer was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and an Annalee and Barnett Newman Foundation Grant in 2011.
Read more about Ferrer and his legacy in obituaries from Artforum, artnet, ARTnews, and Hyperallergic. For more on his life and work, visit his website.