Duke Riley is a Boston-born artist based in Brooklyn, NY.

A former tattoo artist, he lived in a pigeon coop while attending RISD in the early 90s before earning his MFA from Pratt Institute. He taught art in underserved communities and domestic violence shelters in Boston and New York City in the late 90s and early 2000s while continuing to pursue his art practice.

Over the past two decades, he has produced critically acclaimed works that explore the interface of institutional power and the natural world. Along with his highly intricate drawings, mosaics, and scrimshaw made from maritime detritus, he has carried out a litany of complex subversive projects including being arrested for piloting a homemade submarine into the security zone of the Queen Mary 2 in New York Harbor, trained pigeons smuggling cigars from Cuba to Key West, a suitcase of bed bugs that appeared in a Trump hotel, flying 2000 pigeons wearing LED lights over the East River from an aircraft carrier, and an action movie written and filmed by inmates in a Somali pirate detention center.

Duke Riley has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Havana Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, Mercosul Biennial, and Philigraphica. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Riley divides the year between his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where he still keeps pigeons and a studio on a boat in Rhode Island where he collects ocean plastic. His first exhibition at the gallery will take place in 2025.