Federico Massa is a world-renowned street artist with a unique style that blends hyper-realistic animal portraiture with psychedelically bright backgrounds. He gained traction in the 1990s as a rebellious graffiti artist in the burgeoning street art movement under the alias “Cruz.” As his body of work progressed, he began using the symbol of a hyena (iena in Italian), which led to his current alias “iena Cruz.”
Originally from Milan, Cruz has called Brooklyn home for the past ten years. Initially trained in stage set design at Milan’s prestigious Brera Academy of Art, he is primarily known internationally for his large-scale, eco-conscious murals that use special nanotechnology-infused paints to scrub pollution from the air around them.
Throughout the years, iena Cruz has expanded his practice to include a variety of different mediums. In 2018, he spent six months studying screen printing techniques at the Gowanus Print Lab in Brooklyn and began producing original silk-screened textiles as samples for future upholstery fabrics and wall coverings. The following year, he focused on the ceramic processes of modeling, firing, glazing, and re-firing during a six-month project at La Mano Pottery in Manhattan, and produced numerous objects including lampshades, ornamental plates and knives, pitchers, and vases. With this multidisciplinary knowledge, he has launched a design collection called Zurcanei that features custom textiles, wallpaper, mosaic, clothing, and custom home art decor. In this spirit, iena Cruz has collaborated with designer Jan Kath to bring the worlds of street art and textile art together: Cruz painted murals directly on the walls of the Jan Kath gallery in New York, replacing select areas on the wall with hand-knotted carpets in the same design, thus blurring the line between the fabric and the hand-painted mural.
Recent work also includes Hand Woodblock Printing. Designed in NYC and hand- made in Jaipur, Cruz is exploring textile production based on an ancient Indian technique of woodblock printing to support and draw attention to the importance of preserving artisanal traditions.