Jorge Costa was born in Luanda, Angola in 1974. His work explores the intersection between spatial dynamics and audience engagement, often making the work on-site with the intention of allowing the viewer to collaborate in its production and become an active participant in the experience. His art practice draws from different disciplines such as biomimetics, microbiology, bio-architecture, climate science, and the Anthropocene.

His work has been exhibited in institutions such as Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, VT, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, Japan, Fundação da Juventude, Oporto, Portugal, Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, MA, Fowler Arts Collective, Brooklyn, NY, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition, Brooklyn, NY, A.P.E. Gallery, Northampton, MA, Artists Space, Tribeca, NY, Hemphill Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., and Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge, MA.

Costa has received a number of awards and fellowships including the Luso-American Artist Grant, Fundação da Juventude, Oporto, Portugal, Rudolph Zallinger Painting Prize, Hartford, CT, Artist Grant Award, Massachusetts Cultural Council, MA, Artist Fellowship Award, Springfield Cultural Council, MA, Outstanding Painting Prize, Cambridge Art Assn., Cambridge, MA, and Award of Excellence, Ridgefield Guild of Artists, Ridgefield, CT (awarded by Cheryl Brutvan, Curator of Contemporary art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

He is currently an adjunct professor at Westfield State University, MA, STCC, MA, Springfield College, MA, and Manchester Community College, CT.

"Jorge Costa's intricate, miniature cultural icons executed with the draftsman-like quality of a Dürer, stud and embed the overall painting with their graphite presence, conjuring alarm, delight, surprise, and shock, individually, and as composites within the larger pictures, living in the western world. A depiction of the Lincoln Memorial sports a satellite dish and Mickey Mouse ears; a gas mask or the Pope, might save us from oil fumes, chemical spillages and pollution, but from ourselves? What could enliven us to what Western culture’s swill of vacant images, consumerism, and earth’s degradation did and does to each of us, to this artist,  in our daily lives? Costa’s work enlivens. It helps us look at the road ahead, the one we’re on, get back on the tightrope and inch ourselves eventually upright until we can see the bigger picture, the wreckage we cause. Oil is a major player in some of these pieces, that’s clear. But Costa paints and draws fragility into these slow motion spoofs of a world in collapse."

Donna Fleischer