KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is thrilled to announce our 2026 Artist in Residence, Antonio Romero (b. 1978). During his residency in New York City between Sunday, September 6, and Tuesday, October 6, 2026, the multidisciplinary artist will create a painting installation, titled MIRROR, in The B Side Gallery at 563 Grand Street. The reception is on Friday, September 18, 6-8pm.
This culminating presentation is a new chapter in Romero’s two ongoing “sister” series: Navarone (2016) and Tropicalia (2019). The exhibition consists of large-scale landscape murals from the Tropicalia series and new unsettling figurative works from the Navarone series that showcase his exploration of power.
Admittedly a socio-politically charged artist, Romero does not hide from the politics or the complexities of how power operates in our societies. With his Tropicalia series, the artist uses the reduction of the tropics in Central America.
The landscapes become caricatures of reality with only one type of tree represented–palm trees. While in Navarone, the haunting faceless figures implicate the audience as a mirror. Anonymity often emboldens people to make harsh, unthinking comments, a phenomenon frequently observed on social media, making participants both victims and victimizers. Repression and intolerance have become the new global pandemic on and offline. By inviting audiences into his installation, Romero surrounds them with his paintings and curated works to help them recognize their complicity, subjectivities, and relationship to power. Participation leads to the understanding that entrenched frameworks serve only the few at the top.
In past iterations of the project, Romero’s Tropicalia and Navarone series have garnered him international acclaim, with solo exhibitions of the series at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in California (2026) and Museo de Arte de El Salvador (MARTE) in San Salvador (2024-2025) and works from the series entering the collections of Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2020 and MOLAA in 2026. In this presentation, the gallery will be awash in blue light. World leaders use this color to denote calm, peace, and trust, to endear the public to their direction. For Romero, the color in his work represents the silent violence that corrupts the public’s behavior without their awareness. Through this illustration of how the powerful disruptively message their aims as well as the people’s impact on each other, Romero’s work builds a collective memory with the public that serves as a warning for generations to recognize their part.
MIRROR ultimately asks audiences to look beyond the paintings and into themselves. Rather than assigning blame to any one nation or political system, Romero reveals power as a universal force sustained by institutions and individuals alike. By placing viewers within his immersive environment, he encourages reflection on how images, narratives, and symbols shape our perceptions and participation in society. The exhibition does not offer easy answers. Instead, it insists that confronting uncomfortable truths is the first step toward dismantling systems of abuse, preserving collective memory, and imagining a future built on accountability rather than domination.