In work infused with irony and grounded in the textures of her home base of Santo Domingo, Quisqueya Henríquez highlights the long-running divide between Western notions of art and the local arts and culture of Latin America. Her practice was forged in the avant-garde Cuban art scene of the late 1980s, expanded in Santo Domingo, and encompasses performance, installation, collage, sculpture, music, and video, not to mention the sights, sounds, and stuff of her Caribbean city. Conflation—of high and low, art and everyday life, and Western art historical movements and indigenous Caribbean crafts—is at the heart of everything she does. By merging, for example, sensational local news headlines and references to High Modernist Abstraction, Henríquez creates jarring juxtapositions that force Latino voices into a realm from which they were historically excluded, while also sending-up stereotypes.
In work infused with irony and grounded in the textures of her home base of Santo Domingo, Quisqueya Henríquez highlights the long-running divide between Western notions of art and the local arts and culture of Latin America. Her practice was forged in the avant-garde Cuban art scene of the late 1980s, expanded in Santo Domingo, and encompasses performance, installation, collage, sculpture, music, and video, not to mention the sights, sounds, and stuff of her Caribbean city. Conflation—of high and low, art and everyday life, and Western art historical movements and indigenous Caribbean crafts—is at the heart of everything she does. By merging, for example, sensational local news headlines and references to High Modernist Abstraction, Henríquez creates jarring juxtapositions that force Latino voices into a realm from which they were historically excluded, while also sending-up stereotypes.
