Geraldo Gonzalez invites us to look through his eyes into a kaleidoscopic, utopian world where good triumphs over evil and public transportation reigns supreme. A passionate transit enthusiast, the majority of Geraldo’s artworks concern the public transportation systems of the greater Delaware Valley, highlighting them with bright swathes of pattern and color. His daily experiences with public transportation are depicted with radiating color, bathing his compositions in rainbow light. In Sensing Justice with Geraldo Gonzalez, this utopian transit imagery is interwoven with multifaceted self portraits that possess similar moralizing and expressive power. Geraldo’s self portraits illustrate his inner feelings, assert his cultural identity, and often represent himself in an imagined role, such as a boxer, a prince, or a president. These self-inserted characters, framed by flat, saturated, comic-like backgrounds, position the artist with the ability to combat and overcome moral, social and cultural issues he grapples with in everyday life. His use of perspective leads us into the artworks, inviting us into a vast, technicolored fantasy world plagued by universalizing struggles with corruption and self-expression. The altered words on signs and sides of buses signal to us that we are entering another world, a world where public transportation means agency, community, and joy. Geraldo’s artwork is not only a testament to his passion for local transit systems but also an effort to address injustice and imagine a more promising, prismatic world. Through his vibrant self portraits and transit-centered landscapes, we are drawn to share in this same sense of hope.

Geraldo Gonzalez is a Puerto Rican American artist born in 1988 and based in Wilmington, Delaware. He is first and foremost a transit artist, known colloquially as “The King of Transit.” He sources material for his artwork from his trips on local transportation systems in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Geraldo is a prolific multimedia artist, working in colored pencil, acrylic paint, watercolor, digital photography and video. He has been a member of the Creative Vision Factory in Wilmington, Delaware since its opening in 2011, fostering a mutually beneficial, long lasting relationship with the organization. Geraldo has exhibited widely throughout Delaware, in solo shows at the Creative Vision Factory and MarketPlace Gallery, and group exhibitions at the Delaware Art Museum, the Delaware Contemporary, Chris White Gallery, the Biggs Museum of American Art, and the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has four artworks in the University of Delaware’s permanent collection and is represented by the Koelsch Gallery in Houston, Texas. Through his frequently updated social media (@thekingoftransit), we are invited to follow the artist’s process and ever-colorful evolution.

Curatorial Statement
Jillian Pini, Emerging Curatorial Fellow