Background: Miatta Kawinzi, New Patterns (detail), 2021. Colored pencil on paper transferred to digital print, dimensions variable. Insert: Miatta Kawinzi, The fragrance of our blooming, 2021. Archival pigment print, 24 x 20 inches.
Artist Talk with Miatta Kawinzi and Ronny Quevedo
Thursday, April 29, 6-7pm ET
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Please join us for a conversation between artist Miatta Kawinzi and curator-mentor Ronny Quevedo in conjunction with Kawinzi’s solo exhibition, Soft is Strong. Kawinzi employs multimedia installation, video, and prints to consider conditions of fragmentation, multiplicity, and softness within the African diaspora as sites for belonging, possibility, and regeneration. Born in the Southern United States to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, the New York-based artist’s work explores cultural hybridity, motifs of doubling, and linguistic experimentation in conversation with Black feminist literary traditions, uplifting a poetics of liberation that simultaneously holds space for loss while imagining paths towards reparation and renewal. Kawinzi and Quevedo will be available for questions following the conversation.
The event will be live-captioned as well as recorded, captioned, and posted to our website after the event. If you have additional access questions or needs, please contact info@cueartfoundation.org (ideally with at least 48 hours before the event) and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Miatta Kawinzi (she/her/they/them) is a Kenyan-Liberian-American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator raised in Nashville, TN, and Louisville, KY, and based in NYC. She received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College. Her work has been presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PopRally, Red Bull Arts Detroit, BRIC, Maysles Cinema, and the Museum of the Moving Image, among other spaces. She has been awarded artist residencies in spaces including the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (Tulsa, OK), POV Spark in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture (NYC, DC, and Venice, Italy), Red Bull Arts Detroit (Detroit, MI), the Cité internationale des arts (Paris, France, with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), the Bemis Center (Omaha, NE), and the Bag Factory (Johannesburg, South Africa). Kawinzi has been awarded a 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, the 2019 Bemis Center Alumni Award, and the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant administered by Queer|Art. She has taught art at Hampshire College and the University of Richmond and worked as a museum, youth, and community arts educator throughout NYC.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador) works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. He received his MFA from Yale University (2011) and BFA from Cooper Union (2003). Quevedo's work has been exhibited at the Denver Art Museum (2021), the Albright Knox Gallery (2021), Foxy Productions (2021), Upfor Gallery (2019), James Fuentes Gallery (2019), the Whitney Museum of American Art (2018), Socrates Sculpture Park (2017), and the Queens Museum (2017). Solo presentations include Silueta, Rubber Factory (2019); Field of Play, Open Source Gallery (2019); and no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum (2017). Group exhibitions include ACE: Art on Sports, Promise, and Selfhood, University Art Museum at Albany (2019); Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum (2018); and the traveling exhibition Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly (2017-19). His work has been reviewed in Artforum and Hyperallergic, and is highlighted in Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, Politics by Arlene Davila (2020). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, and other world-renowned cultural institutions. Quevedo is a recipient of a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art.