Midwest Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Cherry Wood

Saturday, October 11, 2025 @ 10:20am, Wayne State University

Patterns steps away from performance, seeking new ways to speak through art

Cherry Wood, is an artist with a Bachelor and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor in Canada. Over the past few years, he has attended art residencies across Europe, Mexico, and the United States with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

His practice is shaped by his autobiographical identifications to and with a variety of cultural forms and phenomena: immigration, dream and memory, self-exploration, queer experience, and the ways the body carries fear and desire through transformation. Cherry creates photographic installations with American iconography, folkloric clothing from his native home, and objects or materials that hold emotional resonance, such as heirlooms, photographs, wood, hand-painted plaster masks, and the structure of names on paper. At the heart of his work is the tension between exposure and concealment, and how we mark ourselves and our environment, to feel real, safe, and seen. His practice does not always seek resolution; instead, it creates space for the complexity of being soft and strong, personal and historical.

Cherry has received support by organizations including CultureSource, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is currently enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program as a Gilbert Fellow in the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.