SEARCHING & FINDING • New Works by Peter Daniel Bernal

Anchored in personal and ancestral memory, “Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage” is a new art exhibition featuring Michigan artist Peter Bernal opening at The Marshall M. Frederick Sculpture Museum on March 8^th and running through May 24^th that through a striking collection of painting delves into the emotional weight of cultural displacement and the struggle to reclaim a lost identity.

Bernal’s work is inspired by the legacies of his grandparents and imagines the lives of ancestors he never knew, using art as a means of inquiry, healing, and self-discovery. His visually evocative works invite viewers to reflect on their own heritage, identity, and the universal search for belonging.

Originating from Houston, Texas, Peter Daniel Bernal graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2000 with a BFA in painting. He received additional education at the Rhode Island School of Design and trained in printmaking and drawing in Weimar, Germany, where he lived from 2010 to 2015. In 2015, he relocated from Germany to Detroit. His primary focus is on storytelling-based oil painting, but he also creates polychromed ceramic, linoleum prints, and pastel drawings. Since living in Detroit, he is also working as a muralist around the city.

“I paint things about topics that are hard for people to visualize, such as mental illness or prejudice, using narrative to connect with viewers,” he states when asked about the different goals he is attempting to achieve with his art.  “I work in a heavily imaginative and intuitive manner that I consider a form of secular votive painting, with the goal of lessening the pain of hate and prejudice.”

“My compositions begin with the seed of a story, but the ideas are developed through constant revisions, like a writer’s drafting process. My canvases are worked slowly, and I use many layers of paint to make my voice seen and heard. The materiality of paint is critical to my process; oil color lets me to build an idea and a composition with organic slowness, allowing for discovery.”

“The texture and impasto of the paint show my personal fingerprint,” he continues. “As a result of the thick handling, more interesting forms and complex textures are created. My outdoor murals and my linoleum cuts are a bit different, as they highlight storytelling without the same emphasis on material.”

When asked about his artistic influences, Bernal says his renderings contain remnants of devotional art, such as Eastern Orthodox religious icons and syncretic Mexican retablos. “I am inspired by the intention and spiritual intensity driving the creation of these works. Currently, I am particularly enthusiastic about East German social realism for its use of figures, often in Surrealist or magical environments, to express political or social arguments.  Another influence are indigenous Aztec codices, which are fearless with respect to subject matter, like human sacrifice, and stem from a rich and layered narrative tradition that I am eager to mine more deeply.”

“I aim to reach two groups with my work,” he continues.  “My primary audience is people at the fringes of their communities, especially young people with whom I share a similar upbringing and experiences. I come from a poor, tightly woven minority culture defined by physical labor and the pressure to conform. I want to make art that inspires people to break away from hardship and cultural restrictions and demonstrates the value of creativity as a means of growth.”

“I believe this to be especially important if one comes from a background where art and personal expression are not understood. My grandfather was a sharecropper, and as children my mother and aunts labored beside him in the cotton fields, as was common practice in South Texas; they worked extremely hard to survive and had no time for art. I discovered art in public school and through it found the skills and conviction to leave my known community behind, and the tools to navigate new worlds and a different future.”

“Art gave me a way to articulate my experiences, and I want to help other people find their voices. I also hope to show as a working artist that art is a rich resource for learning how to live and a path to deeper meaning. I have expanded into public and much more accessible mural painting as a way of connecting more directly with the Detroit community.”

“My secondary target audience is the powers that be and people of privilege whom I could not otherwise reach, the people with the power to make change. I hope through my paintings and public murals to suggest our commonalities and encourage appreciation of our differences, to articulate my experience as an invisible Chicano, and to express solidarity with the disenfranchised. Although I am critical of the power establishment in my work, I am also optimistic. I believe that art, music, and literature can remind us of our inalienable human value.”

When asked about what engaged his early interest to become an artist, Peter says he first started noticing it around the age of eight. “My teachers noticed I had an exceptional interest and kept encouraging me,” he reflects. “A lot of kids stepped  away from art as they get older and became involved with things like sports, but art has always spoken to me.”

“Ossawa Tanner and Vincent Van Gogh were my gateways into the arts, and later when I went to art school was introduced to more sophisticated and obscure artists, but I always go back to these two for several reasons, mainly because they created such deeply personal art that showed me a way to progress - the outsider angle spoke to me a lot”

With so many divergent elements blended into his visual narratives, doesn’t Bernal find it difficult to thread them all together?  After all, a novelist has different chapters to tell his story sequentially, whereas Bernal only has a singular image or painting to achieve this task.

“It may sound hoity-toity, but one of the most important goals I’m striving to achieve with my art is to be understood as a person - that’s my angle - to be seen as person and not a cliché’ of stereotype of what I am, but in the universal attributes that makes humanity important.  When that happens, the differences between us diminish.  This is difficult to achieve in art. The most difficult challenge I find in rendering my art centers upon this synthesis  between my culture and what I’m about and making a strong human connection to the viewer.”

Particularly interesting is Bernal’s experience at The Rhode Island School of Design, where such famous artists such as fashion designer Stephan Sprouse, filmmaker Gus Van Sant, musician/comedian Martin Mull, and the band Talking Heads all attended prior to embarking upon their own ground-breaking careers.

“To be clear, I only went there for one semester and finished my studies in Kansas City, but my experience at Rhode Island  taught me how to be an artist,” he reflects. “It was my first life experience being with other serious artists, yet I also detected some negative things about being an artist given my personal identity and background that helped me realize it was going to an uphill battle because I wasn’t from the same social strata or cultural identity as other artists, but on the other side of the coin made me realize that’s every artists’ journey in one way or another.”

Of particular interest is Bernal’s experience living in Weimar, Germany, which is particularly famous for the many so-called ‘Decadent’ artists that emerged out of Germany in the 1920s and 30s such as Otto Dix, who’s work depicted the social decay and moral corruption of the society around them.

“I picked up a lot about social realism and the use of figures through my experience there,” he reflects. “I spent five years there and my wife is of German heritage and a German citizen. We met when she was on a Mellon Foundation contract as a conservator and I was a preparer, When her contract was over I decided I would move to Germany with her and focus upon becoming a serious artist and I discovered so much about myself when I lived there. It was one of the best choices I ever made because it taught me the role of the foreigner - of being a stranger in a strange land.  I felt that way in my hometown of Houston, Texas, as well; but in Germany I felt accepted, with likeminded people of similar persuasion and it was a good fit living there.”

“I drew a lot from those German Weimar artists because their work spoke to me from a personal aspect in terms of the way they put themselves in a place through their art where the individual viewer had a social responsibility to make regarding art that was responding to the social powers happening at that time. Ironically, I would have been a neighbor to Kandinsky if he had been alive at that time I was living in Germany, but I also learned through my experiences there that artists deserve right and respect within society.”

When asked about his goals for this latest exhibition at SVSU, Bernal says it will feature about 20 to 25 works created mostly with the past five years, “I’m kind of dipping my toes in the water and testing the audience,” he explains. “With a lot of young people at the university, and the rise of art manufactured by Artificial Intelligence, I want to show art as a form of resistance, which is very important within the authoritarian world we live within.  My art is a very slow and deliberate process, much like the act of resistance itself.  I don’t want to be the producer of a commodity when I create, so I take my cues from my favorite artists who were extremely slow and purposeful.”

“The exhibition is about more than my personal story—it’s about all of us,” concludes Bernal. “It’s about the ways history has shaped our identities and the ongoing effort to reclaim what has been lost.”

To deepen the conversation, historian and cultural educator Eric Hemenway will present a special lecture on Friday, March 7 from 6:00–8:00PM. This exhibition opening event will offer insights into the broader historical and indigenous contexts of Bernal’s work and will provide a unique opportunity for audiences to engage with the themes of the exhibition and explore the power of art as a vessel for cultural preservation.

Additionally,  the Museum will also host an Artist Talk with exhibiting painter Peter Bernal moderated by esteemed curator and contemporary art advocate Isabelle Weiss, on Sunday, March 30, 2025, from 2:00–4:00PM. The moderated conversation will offer audiences an in-depth look into Bernal’s creative process, inspirations, and the themes that shape his work.  Drop-in guided tours of the exhibition are available every Saturday at noon. No reservation needed.

“Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage” is free and open to the public.  The Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum is located on the campus of Saginaw Valley State University, 7400 Bay Road, University Center, Michigan. Museum hours are Monday through Saturday, 11:00AM to 5:00PM. For more information, call (989) 964-7125 or visit the Museum’s website at www.marshallfredericks.org.