Manuel Acevedo was born in Newark and has worked here for many years. Acevedo’s work combines projected image, wall drawing, animation, and photography to explore how light and movement shape experience. Through various media, he employs visual language in ways that transform flat, static images into active spaces of experimentation.

Acevedo’s recent solo and group exhibitions include Made and Unmade (2011) at Cuchifritos in NYC, Maraya Art Centre, UAE, Al-Ghaib, Aesthetics of Disappearance and Third Steaming, NYC, and Planet of the Slums. In 2010, the critically acclaimed Keys of Light exhibition was presented at the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, Texas, as well as at the Bronx River Art Center. He is a recipient of the 2009 Visual Art Network Residence for the Camera Communis (Knoxville, TN). He is affiliated with the Center for Book Arts, the AIR Workspace Program, NYU, and the SPACES’ World Artists Program. His awards include the 2005 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant; Longwood Arts Project: Digital Matrix Commission; 1999 & 2001 Mid-Atlantic Foundation’s Artist as Catalysts Award, and 1998-99 the Studio Museum in Harlem, AIR. His group exhibitions have been featured at Museo de la Ciudad in Spain, Arte de Puerto Rico, Real Art Ways, Exit Art, Queens Museum of Art, PS 1, El Museo del Barrio, the Drawing Center in Westfaelischer Kunstverein in Germany. His solo exhibitions have been shown at Jersey City Museum and the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies.

Acevedo has been a pioneer in the Newark art scene and has produced an extensive body of work about the city, for the city.