The Bruce Museum will exhibit a selection of work by its 2025 artist-in-residence Moses Ros (American, b. 1958) in the Museum’s Gallery Lobby from Oct. 8, 2025–Jan. 4, 2026. Ros spent his residency at the Bruce creating artwork in response to the exhibition “Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist” (February 6–April 27, 2025). The resulting exhibition will feature 12 works that reflect Ros’s engagement with Lazzell’s practice as well as nature as inspiration for his art.
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. In ‘HUMAN / NATURE’ Ros marshals color and its absence to call attention to issues around environmental loss. Like Blanche 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 infuse the exhibition 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 obscure 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.
Ros was chosen as the Bruce’s 2025 Artist-in-Residence because he demonstrated commitment and experience working with local communities and had an arresting artistic style, incorporating vibrant, positive colors that echoed the work of Blanche Lazzell.
Ros has had solo exhibitions at the Sugar Hill Museum in New York, 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 began printmaking at The Bronx Printmakers and has worked at some of the most prestigious printmaking workshops in New York, including The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Lower East Side Printshop, and The Manhattan Graphics Center. He is a founding member of Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA and the ArteLatAm artist collectives.
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.
Ros is a registered architect in New York and earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Pratt Institute.
