Join us Saturday, November 1 at 2PM, for a presentation about the artist by Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D., emeritus professor of art history and Latin American and Latinx Studies at William Paterson University and editor of Soriano’s catalogue raisonné.

About Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D.

Dr. Anreus was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to the U.S. as an exile with his family in 1970, settling in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1972. He received his BA in art history from Kean College, where he was mentored by social art historian Alan Wallach, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he worked with Patricia Mainardi, Marlene Park, Laurie Schneider Adams, and Jack Flam. He was a curator at the Montclair Art Museum from 1986 through 1993, and at the Jersey City Museum from 1993 through 2001, where he organized traveling exhibitions of Jaune Quick to See Smith, Freddy Rodríguez, Melvin Edwards and Juan Sánchez, as well as Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, which contextualized Shahn’s obsession with the subject as an emblem of immigration and political radicalism from the 1930s through 1967.

From 1997 through 2018 Dr. Anreus served on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and as its president from 2014 through 2017. He has been president emeritus from 2018 – present. Anreus was professor of art history and Latin American/Latinx Studies at William Paterson University (September 2001-June 2023). In September-October 2023 he was the Leonard A. Lauder senior visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, where he worked on a research project focused on dictatorships and exile in the work of Cuban American, Dominican York and Haitian American artists.

He is the author of seven books, including the award winning “A Ver” monograph on Luis Cruz Azaceta, and over sixty catalogue and periodical essays. He has published in Art Journal, Third Text, Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, Art Nexus, Diario de Cuba, and Commonweal.

Dr. Anreus’ publications include Orozco in Gringoland. The Years in New York (University of New Mexico Press, 2001); Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (Rutgers University Press and Jersey City Museum, 2001), editor and contributor; The Social and The Real. Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (Penn State Press, 2006), coeditor and contributor; Mexican Muralism. A Critical History (University of California Press, 2012), coeditor and contributor; Luis Cruz Azaceta. A Ver monograph series (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2014) Latino Book Award, Best Art Book in English, 2015; Roberto Estopiñán. In his own words/En sus propias palabras (ARS Atelier City Press, 2019), editor; A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2022), coeditor and contributor. Forthcoming publications are Havana in the 1940s. Artists, Critics and Exhibitions and Raúl Milián: The Dark is Light Enough.