Dario Robleto
Dario Robleto (born 1972) is an American transdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, teacher and “citizen-scientist”. His research-driven practice results in intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his exploration of music, popular culture, science, war, and American history. Early life and education. Robleto was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1972 and he received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1997. Work. Robleto uses unexpected materials such as melted vinyl records, dinosaur bones, meteorites, glass produced by atomic explosions, lost heartbeat recordings from the 19th century, and he transforms these artifacts from the vast  inventory of humanity's collective past into delicately layered objects that are sincere and personal meditations on love, death, eroding memory, and healing. A self-described “materialist poet,” Robleto emphasizes the relationship between language and materials as a crucial component to his approach. “Liner notes,” usually in the form of a wall label, accompany many of the works, poetically detailing the sources embedded therein. A great appreciator of DJ culture, and a former DJ himself, Robleto considers his work a mixtape or “sampling” of humanity; he remixes forgotten stories and materials and reconstructs them into new artistic forms as a  lens to view the future through the past. Increasingly, Robleto has been participating in activities outside the art world. In 2015 he was appointed Artist in Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering, and he was invited to co-organize the 2016 International Conference on Mobile Brain-Body Imaging and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation, and Creativity., he is co-organizing year 2 of the conference in 2017. In 2015 Robleto and Contreras-Vidal coauthored a scholarly paper titled "Your Brain on Art: Emergent Cortical Dynamics During Aesthetic Experiences”. The study considered “the brain  response to conceptual art [as] studied with mobile electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the neural basis of aesthetic experiences.” In February 2016, Robleto was coeditor of "Mobile Brain/Body Imaging and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity" in a special issue of the science journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. Robleto is currently one of six artists in the Artists-in-Residence program at the prestigious SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and in 2015 he joined a distinguished team of scientists as the artistic consultant on the Breakthrough Initiatives, which is the most extensive effort to find intelligent life beyond  Earth to date. Specifically, Robleto will work on the Breakthrough Message project—a multi-national effort that aims to encourage intellectual and technical debate about how and what to communicate if the current search for intelligent beings beyond Earth is successful. Teaching and lecturing. Robleto has been a visiting artist and lecturer at many universities and institutions including Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland. In 2013–2014 he served as the California College of the Arts Viola Frey Distinguished Visiting Professor, Oakland, California, and in  2014–2016 he was an artist in residence at Maryland Institute College of Art. Most recently he was appointed as the first Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois. Awards, recognitions, and media. Awards have included the 2004 International Association of Art Critics Award for best exhibition in a commercial gallery at the national level. The exhibition was "Roses in the Hospital / Men Are The New Women" at Inman Gallery in 2003. In 2007 he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and in 2009  he was a recipient of the USA Rasmuson Fellowship. Robleto has been a research fellow and resident at institutions such as the Menil Collection (2014); Rice University (2013–14); and the Smithsonian Museum of American History (2011). He served as the 2016 Texas State Artist Laureate, he currently sits on the advisory board at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and is on the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art Teen Conference Advisory Committee. Robleto has participated in many residencies including the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, in 2014; and Artpace, San Antonio, Texas, in 2000. In 2017  he was chosen as an Artist in Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. His work has been profiled in numerous publications and media including "Radiolab", Krista Tippet's "On Being", the New York Times, and the "New York Times Science Section". Robleto's diptych The First Time, The Heart (First Pulse, Flatline), 2017 was awarded a “Prix de Print” award. The Prix de Print is a bimonthly competition, in which a single work is selected by an outside juror to be the subject of a brief essay. Robleto's diptych recalls the method of the first sphygmograph, a technology that  made its first marks in soot using a human hair as a stylus, and the data it produced to suggest the life cycle, from the first pulse to the final flat line. Prix de Print Selected solo exhibitions. 2019 2018 2014 2012 2011 2008 2006 2003 Selected group exhibitions. 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2008 2004 Publications: author and co-author. 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2010 2001 1999