Carmen Cicero is now in the midst of his seventh decade in the contemporary art world of New York City and Cape Cod as well as being a celebrated jazz musician. 

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His works of the 1950s—collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and other major museums—combined the gestures of Abstract Expressionism with the complex emergent forms of Surrealist automatism. In the 1960s, Cicero was one of the first members of the American avant-garde to return to figuration, pursuing, through the 1960s and 1970s, a style called “figurative expressionism.” This evolved, beginning in the 1990s, into his more recent “visionary” mode, in which he depicts, with a startling clarity, 

mysterious scenes animated by multiple contradictory feelings—unfulfilled desires, jealousy, despair, and isolation—as well as a generous dose of humor. 

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Carmen was born on August 14, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey. He attended the New Jersey State Teachers College, and briefly pursued graduate work in painting at Hunter College, New York, studying with Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. The two abstract painters and their circle of artists, poets, and musicians were immensely influential for Cicero, whose singular explorations of abstraction coalesced within the overarching New York school of his teachers and friends. 

On the Cape, Carmen was a founding member of the Long Point Gallery in Provincetown and is currently represented there by Berta Walker Gallery.