Ronny Quevedo

My practice is an examination of the vernacular languages and aesthetic forms generated by displacement, migration, and resilience. Inspired by my own family history and migration, I transcribe the graphics of locality, community, and remembered environments into my work. This takes the form of celestial, terrestrial, and bodily mappings that include basketball and indoor soccer courts, indigenous architecture, and textiles. My paintings, mixed media works, and sculptures serve as tributes to the shifting landscapes and the narratives of people moving through them.

Ronny Quevedo’s work addresses issues of migration and displacement by incorporating topographies that reflect on the pathfinding strategies utilized by migrants. He explores the improvisational movement used in sports as a metaphor for adaptation, subversive resistance, and survival in the face of adverse conditions and changing environments. By centering games and play, Quevedo’s work creates a space in which the malleability of boundaries, alongside competition, evolve and transform identity. 

Beyond contributing to the formal, material, and conceptual elements of his practice, Quevedo’s family histories inspire him to consider the political and social implications of how bodies, or groups of bodies, exist and operate in space. Employing lines, grids, and diagrammatic visuals, his works take on a cartographic quality that explore personal and cultural intersections, offering the possibility of re-imagined geography and history. By incorporating precious materials like gold and silver leaf, Quevedo invites the viewer to question the simultaneous valuation of certain luxuries and the erasure of the artisans who create them. 

Ronny Quevedo: ule ole allez (2022), a solo exhibition presented by Locust Projects in Miami, FL, was a site-specific installation that celebrated the Caribbean, Central, and South American soccer and futsal communities of Miami. Local players were invited into the gallery to play with chalk and ink covered balls, their movements recorded in the marks made on the floors and walls of the space. Accompanied by a series of small drawings and sculptures—along with a video of interviews with players and coaches and local league game footage—the exhibition highlighted athletic immigrant community culture. Exploring the parallels between play and migration, the project spoke to the essential nature of adaptability to both.

Quevedo’s other solo exhibitions include entre aquí y allá, Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY, 2022; Ronny Quevedo: offside, University Art Museum at University of Albany, NY, 2022; and Ronny Quevedo: at the line, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, CO, 2021. Group exhibitions that featured his work include: Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC, 2022; Comunidades Visibles: The Materiality of Migration, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2021; and Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 2018.

Quevedo was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2022), the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2021), the Harpo Foundation New Work Project Grant (2021), and the Jerome Hill Artists Fellowship (2019). Quevedo completed his M.F.A. at the Yale School of Art in 2012, and his B.F.A. at the Cooper Union in 2003.