GHC Art Gallery

HUGO MORO was born in Havana, Cuba, and was influenced by the socio-political shocks of the Cuban Revolution, initially by the assassination of my pro-Castro maternal grandfather and later by my mother’s disillusionment with the ensuing regime. I, with my family, immigrated to New York City mother’s disillusionment with the ensuing regime. I, with my family, immigrated to New York City School of Art and Design, Pratt Institute, and The Fashion Institute of Technology. From 1978 until 1999, I held various art director positions in advertising and publishing.  

In 1999, I relocated to Miami, Florida, and returned to school at Florida International University, where I completed an MFA in 2006. I visited Cuba after over thirty years of absence while at FIU to research my MFA thesis. Since then, some of the highlights of my career have been participating in the IX Havana Biennial and the First Ghetto Biennial in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2014, along with my Bellingham, WA native husband of 32 years, I relocated to Seattle, where I initially volunteered in community services and created several temporary public art installations, while I maintained a studio at Project-106 in Pioneer Square. In 2021, I moved to Tacoma, WA, where I work from my home studio.

Hugo Moro's upcycled furniture and found object constructions trace energies of intimacy, advocacy and spirtuality. Confronted with deprivations in rural Cuba during childhood, Moro learned to create playthings from discards and weave together their origin stories.

Moro conjures and embellishes narratives that morph and interact with the objects, techniques, and concepts that are encountered in the course of a day, through research or happenstance.

His innate hypervigilance finds an outlet in the making of works that concern themselves with how those objects, techniques, and concepts relate to each other, to us, and to our environment, directly or tangentially.                                             

The making of playthings from found objects provoked by the deprivations he encountered in a rural Cuban childhood, validated by a community that traditionally upcycled materials, has evolved into a practice affected by a lifetime of exposure to International Art practices, which increasingly concern themselves with the preservation if resources. 

Moro’s practice results in works that, although personal, contain universal signifiers that invite the viewer to participate in his drama.