Moses Ros: HUMAN / NATURE Exhibition at the Bruce Museum
Born in New York City in 1958, the Bruce Museum’s 2025 artist-in-residence, Moses Ros, has always found that nature offers inspiration for his art. In *HUMAN / NATURE* — produced in response to the exhibition *Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist* (Bruce Museum, February 6–April 27, 2025) — Ros marshals color and its absence to call attention to issues around environmental loss. Like Lazzell, whose white-line woodcuts fracture the world into chromatic planes separated by contours of exposed white paper, Ros divides his compositions into a series of amorphous, interlocking forms. Across his paintings, mobiles, and sculptures, this brilliantly colored, camouflage-like pattern is punctuated by cut-outs of recognizable wildlife, making further reference to Lazzell’s signature white-line approach.
While the luminous hues that pervade the show at the Bruce Museum communicate Ros’s joyous appreciation of nature, they also act as a secondary form of camouflage, obscuring the darker realities that underlie his work. Developed in the service of war and hunting, camouflage mimics and manipulates the appearance of the landscape to conceal the destructive forces lying in wait. As a result of these and other human interventions, the species Ros depicts here — the passenger pigeon, dodo bird, and the regal fritillary butterfly, among others — are either endangered or already extinct. By positioning viewers within an immersive environment of the artist’s making, this exhibition seeks to celebrate nature’s beauty while also revealing humanity’s irrevocable impact on the natural world.
About the Artist
Moses Ros is a sculptor, painter, and printmaker of Dominican descent who lives and works in New York City. He creates artworks to lift the human spirit, using bright colors, dynamic shapes, and interactive elements. Ros has had solo exhibitions at the Sugar Hill Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Yeshiva University Museum in New York, as well as the Paterson Museum in New Jersey. He has also exhibited in the Yoryi Morel Gallery of the Institute of Culture and Art in Santiago, Dominican Republic.
Ros has received several public sculpture commissions from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority. His artwork is part of public and corporate collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and the AT&T Collection.
To learn more, visit [brucemuseum.org](https://bit.ly/491Y2Jt).