page_title: Alberto Rey
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Alberto Rey / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Installation of "Alberto Rey: Biological Regionalism: Scajaquada Creek, Buffalo, New York, USA, 2012-13" exhibition at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in 2014. Photo by Biff Henrich. Photo owned and used with permission from artist.
context_page_description: Alberto Rey is an American painter, illustrator, filmmaker, educator, writer, and Orvis-endorsed fly-fishing guide. His work has been featured in over 200 exhibitions and screenings and has been included in the permanent collections of twenty museums including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, El Museo del Barrio, Extremaduran and Latin American Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Museum of Latin American Art, and the Peabody Essex Museum. Rey is a distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He has written two books about extinct birds and the Bagmati River in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has also had many articles and illustrations published in several magazines. Art historians and curators have also written one book and several essays about his work. Rey has recently been selected as an international finalist for the 2020 Orvis Freshwater Guide of the Year.
context_section_description: After finishing his undergraduate education, Rey briefly lived in Boston, MA, before returning to Miami, FL to work on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Surrounded Islands Project in 1982. After working at the Joan of Arts Studio in Hollywood, FL, Rey pursued graduate studies north at the University of Buffalo and received his Master of Fine Arts Degree specializing in drawing and painting in 1987 (Bosch 2014, 15-16), and began traveling including the countries Spain, Italy, Morocco, Mexico, Caribbean, Iceland, Portugal, England, Wales, Cuba, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Nepal, and New Zealand, heightening an appreciation for the connections between different cultures and their relationship to their environment. Since 1982, Rey's Cuban heritage and immigration to America have played a role in developing his themes of bicultural identity and existence in complex environments. His abstract period of work from 1982 to 1992 involved layering Cuban iconography with his American experiences, symbolizing the struggles of fleeting memories and the romanticization of one's culture.The same year, The Burchfield-Penney Art Center inducted his work “Holy Angels Church and Chair” (1987; mixed media on canvas mounted on board, 96 x 56 inches) into their permanent collection. Rey spent the following year teaching at northeastern high schools and colleges including Lincoln-Sudbury High School, the Art Institute of Boston, New England School of Art and Design, and the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1988, Rey supplemented his education by taking courses in both contemporary art and environmental studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Soon after, Rey's work was inducted into El Museo del Barrio’s (New York City, NY) permanent collection, and he had his first solo NYC show at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MoCHA).
  Rey relocated to Fredonia, NY in 1989 to become a professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia (SUNY Fredonia), where he still teaches drawing and painting courses to this day. Later in 1989, Rey married Janeil Strong of Gloucester, MA. In 1991, the Burchfield-Penney Arts Center collected a second painting by Rey entitled “Binary Forms: Floating Between.” By 1992, Rey had works collected by several major museums including the Brooklyn Museum of Art (“Las Palmas Son Novias Que Esperan (The Palms Are Lovers Who Wait)”), the Bronx Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (“Binary Forms: XXI” and “Post-nuptial Gold: Time”). From 1992-1999 his work became more representational as he investigated his Cuban culture, its religion, food, politics, and relationship to American society.  
  Rey became a curator and director for the Chautauqua Institution’s Center of the Visual Arts in 1996. Later he became a councilor on the Artist’s Advisory Panel of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
  In 1998, Rey returned to Cuba for the first time since his emigration as a child and later created his first film, "Seeing in the Dark,"a black and white 16mm film about this trip. Rey founded the SAREP (Sport-fishing and Aquatic Resource Educational Programming) Youth Fly Fishing Program which provides children with environmental conservation information and is still the director to this day, though the program is now called Children in the Stream Youth Fly Fishing Program / 4H.
  Post-1999, an increased interest in art history, ecology, and environmental conservation led Rey to incorporate more environmental realism into his work, as with his series "Biological Regionalism" exhibited in 2014 at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. From 2000 to the present day, his work has explored the history of angling art, environmentalism, urban migration, and biology.
  In 2006, Rey founded the annual stream clean-up program called the Canadaway Creek Conservation Project and founded the Brook Trout Restoration Project which teaches children how to introduce brook trout into local waterways. The former project, CCCP, consisted of volunteers removing invasive species, planting native tree species, and removing waste from local waterways in Western New York.
caption: Installation of Alberto Rey's "Biological Regionalism" at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in 2014.
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