School of Art & Design Visitor's Series
New York-based artist Ronny Quevedo will discuss themes in his work currently on view at Krannert Art Museum in the solo exhibition Ronny Quevedo: a l l s t a r s. This expansive new project includes drawings from several lenders across the United States and a site-driven monumental sculpture titled a mother’s hand that the artist has placed in conversation with objects from the museum’s pre-Hispanic Andean art collection.
Ronny Quevedo (b.1981) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and lives and works in New York, NY. Quevedo’s practice spans installation, drawings, and prints, incorporating and subverting aspects of abstraction, painting, collage, cartography, and sports imagery. Deeply engaged with notions of identity, Quevedo reenvisions pre- and post-colonial iconographies. The recuperation of Indigenous languages of abstraction, revalorization of their associated labor, and centering of a living connection between contemporary and centuries-old cultural markers are foundational to Quevedo’s ongoing practice. Navigating nuanced relationships between the personal and the cultural, Quevedo’s work is rooted in his own family history. Quevedo’s father was a professional soccer player in Ecuador and the artist often incorporates the reconstructed and reorganized lines of athletic fields in his work. Similarly, the influence of Quevedo’s mother’s work as a dressmaker is evidenced in his incorporation of materials like muslin and wax tracing paper. By contextualizing these technical materials with ostensibly precious substances like gold and silver leaf, ubiquitous within Andean history, he invites the viewer to interrogate the simultaneous valuation of certain luxuries and erasure of the artisans who create them.