Chandra Cerrito (b. Warwick, RI, 1969) is an artist working across media who has recently focused on drawings and paintings on paper. She graduated from Princeton University, where she earned a BA in Art History and a Certificate of Visual Art with an emphasis in printmaking. In 1991, she moved to California to pursue art making outside of New York’s art world orbit and in an area where artists were constantly expanding the definition of art. At California College of the Arts in Oakland, where she earned an MFA in sculpture, Cerrito created installations with concrete forms, fiber sculptures, and interactive sound.
Since 1994, she has exhibited in galleries and nonprofit arts organizations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in Pasadena, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Oregon, Washington, DC, and Medellin, Colombia. Her drawings have been represented in the flat files of Pierogi in Brooklyn, and her work is included in the collections of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; University of Colorado, Boulder; Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL; and the Art Institute of Medellin, Medellin, Colombia, among others. She has completed several private sculpture commissions as well as a temporary public art project as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Market Street Art in Transit program.
As a strong supporter of other artists, Cerrito has been an art consultant and curator for over twenty years, and she founded a gallery in Oakland, CA, which she directed for eleven years. As a public art advisor, she commissions artists to create site-specific large-scale works for permanent installations. For interior art consulting projects, she places artwork by a wide range of contemporary artists in health care, corporate, hospitality, and retail collections. Cerrito lives with her husband, artist Lewis deSoto, in Napa, CA.