Tomás Esson (b. 1963, Marianao) Nicknamed El Bicho, Esson spent several years living and working in New York before moving to Miami in 2000. He studied at the Academia de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro, as well as the Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba. His art has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally since the 1980's and can be found in collections around the world. They include the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Ludwig Forum for Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany; the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey, México; the Pérez Art Museum in Miami; and the Hirshorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. His work consists of “tormented, mythological beings, erogenous plant life, and other motifs that populate his art’ as described by Janet Batet in A Fertile Universe: Tomás Esson’s Miami Flow. (CINTAS-Knight Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts, 2018-2019)