Rafael Ferrer left his native Puerto Rico at an early age to attend school in the United States. After attending Syracuse University and studying art at the University of Puerto Rico, Ferrer moved to New York in the early 1950's to work as a musician. Ferrer has worked with a broad range of media including sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance art.
In many of his paintings and prints, Rafael Ferrer depicts lush and colorful images from the Dominican Republic, where he spends six months every year. At Tandem he created traditional and Japanese inspired woodblock prints.
According to Elvehjem curator Drew Stevens: "It is interesting to compare Verduras and Oriente Tropical, for while both explore Ferrer's interest in Japanese printmaking, the end results are prints with quite different effects; while Oriente Tropicale is Ferrer's interpretation of a traditional Japanese woodcut, Verduras uses the traditional techniques to interpret one of Ferrer's paintings. The result is a continuing dialogue between the artist and the tradition."