Ronny Quevedo: Composite Portals

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Ronny Quevedo: Composite Portals, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the Gallery. Positioning Andean textiles as conduits between the precolonial past and our postcolonial present, Composite Portals approaches the body as a site where history is accumulated and worn. The works in the exhibition abstract the visual languages of uniforms, tunics, and quipus to reflect on identity and cross-cultural exchange. They serve, per Quevedo, as “tribute to places known, unknown, and lost.”

Quevedo’s new works weave together personal and collective histories to map connections between lineage and inheritance. Taking inspiration from precolonial textiles, these compositions examine traditional patterns of distortion, abstraction, and deconstruction to underscore the ways in which the past is constantly re-formed by the present. Works such as Powers of 10 (a fifth floor walk-up) (2024) and broadway wiphala (2024) take up the gridded design of centuries-old Andean garments as a geometry with universal and culturally-specific meanings. For Quevedo, this pattern provides the means “to create movement within the static structure of the checkerboard.” Its marriage of interlocking opposites challenges binary thinking and fixed systems of meaning by simultaneously referencing pre-Columbian and modernist art histories.

Quevedo notes the continued influence of Édouard Glissant and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui on his new body of work. His compositions continue both postcolonial thinkers' projects of advocating for multiplicity, pushing against reductive dichotomies to make space for complex interconnection. Illustrative of this approach, works such as el valle de la periferia (the valley of the periphery), an ode to Don Francisco de Arobe y sons Pedro and Domingo (2023) illuminate untold histories of the colonial matrix. Quevedo re-envisions the past, describing this pursuit as “[reimagining] points of origin.”

Through his embrace of polyvocality, Quevedo situates his work between histories and identities. Works like myself when I am real – sin ti soy nadie (2021) seamlessly insert symbolic materials from his parents’ biographies into indigenous Andean cultural traditions—an action that, per the artist, “unearths a personal past that migrated many places and times.” The interstitial space occupied by this and other related works allows Quevedo to approach abstraction not as a formal tool, but rather a transformative lens through which displaced, marginalized, or obscured cultures are transposed onto our present moment.

Weaving together opposing materials and diverging narratives, Quevedo upholds a commitment to “interlacing a wide span of time and space. From the Andes to The South Bronx, these interpretations of a re-imagined self … give life to an ancestry of abstraction and transformational figures.”

Ronny Quevedo’s work will be featured in upcoming solo and group presentations at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. In 2022, he was commissioned by Delta Air Lines in partnership with the Queens Museum to create a large-scale permanent installation at LaGuardia Airport, Queens, NY. Other solo presentations of Quevedo’s work include Ronny Quevedo: ule ole allez, Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2022); Ronny Quevedo: offside, University Art Museum, University of Albany, NY (2022); Ronny Quevedo: at the line, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, CO (2021); and no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum, NY (2017), traveled to Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, PA (2019), among others. His work has been in numerous group exhibitions, including El Dorado: Myths of Gold, Americas Society/Council of the Americans, New York, NY (2023); Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC (2022), traveled to Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN (2023), and Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, NH (2024); Pacha, Llacta, Wasichay; Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); and The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2018), among others. Quevedo’s work is in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, CO; Denver Art Museum, CO; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. He is the recipient of many awards and grants, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2022); Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2021); Jerome Hill Artists Fellowship (2019); Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship (2017); Queens Museum / Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2016); and Eliza Long Prize, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2014 & 2013), among others.