Ronny Quevedo: a l l s t a r s: Krannert Art Museum

Ronny Quevedo's solo exhibition a l l s t a r s at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The institution's press release follows:

In layered, intricate drawings invoking the geometry and dynamic movement of playing fields and ball courts across the Americas, New York–based contemporary artist Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981) explores migration, cultural memory, and acts of inheritance. Bridging distant pasts and intimate presents, Quevedo will give these themes visual and sculptural presence in a collaborative, multi-sited project informed in part by Krannert Art Museum as custodian to an extensive collection of pre-Hispanic Andean art.

The works in Krannert Art Museum’s exhibition reflect the aesthetic spirit of Quevedo’s migratory genealogies and play formally with modularity, abstraction, and scale. Quevedo’s work extends to Andean cosmovisions and artmaking: ball courts and dressmaking patterns embellished with gold and silver leaf (the material economies of Andean prestige and Spanish conquest); oblique references to exquisitely woven garments without bodies to fill them; and monumental architectural structures that present their own conundrum of absences. In Quevedo’s hands, fragments of the Andean past act as touchstones, thresholds, and interlocutors that ask for pause and contemplation. Krannert Art Museum’s solo presentation will mark the first time the artist incorporates Andean objects into his work via a custom-scaled and built structure, a mother’s hand. Born in Ecuador and raised in New York, Quevedo brings his Andean heritage into his work in ways both subtle and profound. The careers of his father, a professional soccer player and referee, and of his mother, a dressmaker and seamstress, are evident in the materials, patterns, and curvilinear and gridded lines he uses to invoke the touch, movement, inscription, and play through which his parents’ hands have marked his life and memory.

Quevedo’s a l l s t a r s will reach outside Krannert Art Museum in a new commission the artist will create in collaboration sound composer Charles Edward Fambro. Embracing movement and field lines, this new work will connect student performers as co-creators and provide the artist an opportunity to realize his ideas on a large scale.

Co-curated by Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Allyson Purpura, Senior Curator and Curator of Global African Art.