Multi-media artist Ronny Quevedo will create a major site-specific commission addressing his bicultural upbringing and effects of relocation and displacement on groups and individuals. Emigrating from Ecuador to New York City as a child, Quevedo juxtaposes histories of his mother and father’s respective careers as a tailor and a professional soccer player, against the socio-political backdrop of migration. Quevedo’s multi-layered vinyl wall drawing—comprised of geometric elements that reference American indigenous and pre-Columbian visual language, histories of abstraction, textiles, and sports diagrams—will span five, twenty-foot arched walls of the museum. The commission builds on previous iterations of Quevedo’s vinyl line drawings. His decision to address the museum’s architecture by occupying its walls through his diagrammatic practice is a direct response to the legacy of the arch in secular and sacred spaces. Mining the transformation and adaptation of sacred spaces into contemporary culture, the artist aims to highlight histories of antiquity and ancient sites that honor indigenous and migrant experiences. Expanding three-dimensionally, Quevedo will also present new sculptural works of 3D renderings of objects belonging to the Inca and Huancavilca peoples in the Smithsonian’s research collections of the National Museum of Natural History.
(Excerpt and image above selected from grant proposal. Artwork is copyright of the artist.)