Ben Cuevas is a Los Angeles based artist working in textiles, sculpture, installation, photography, video, sound, and performance. His practice underscores queer/feminist ideologies, with a focus on the condition of embodiment. As a genderqueer, male-bodied, HIV Positive, Latinx artist, his identity directly influences his work, which is often autobiographical.
Born in Riverside, California in 1987 to a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father, he received a Bachelor of Arts in Mixed Media Installation Art from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2010). Afterward, he was awarded an artist's residency at the Wassaic Project in New York State. There he knitted his masterwork to date—a complete human skeleton. Since then he has created several bodies of work, exhibited widely, and used his art as activism to raise awareness around issues of HIV/AIDS.
Cuevas has given talks on various aspects of art and knitting at events and venues including the Textile Society of America Symposium (2014), Vogue Knitting Live (2015), Printed Matter’s Los Angeles Art Book Fair (2017), The Museum of Sex (2018), and as a special guest of the Fire Island Artist Residency (2018). Several books and publications feature Cuevas’s work, such as DUETS: Ben Cuevas & Annie Sprinkle in Conversation (2017), published by Visual AIDS; Queer Threads: Crafting, Identity, and Community (2017), edited by John Chaich and Todd Oldham; Ceci n’est pas un pull (2018), published by Pyramyd Éditions, Paris, France; and Unraveled (2018), published by Thames & Hudson, London, UK.