University of North Texas Cancels Victor Quiñonez Exhibition

The exhibition was supposed to be a homecoming for artist Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez who grew up within the Dallas–Fort Value metro space. The joy constructed when he received the primary batch of photos exhibiting his touring solo exhibition being put in on the University of North Texas’s CVAD Gallery. Quiñonez was wanting ahead to receiving photos of the work being absolutely put in and was engaged on managing the RSVPs for a gap reception to happen this month.

Then, silence.

Quiñonez continued to observe up with the college gallery’s director Stefanie Dlugosz-Acton. The exhibition was scheduled to open on February 3, however Quiñonez is unclear if that truly occurred. It wasn’t till he started receiving DMs from UNT college students, asking if it was closed or there was extra work being executed on it. The blinds had been drawn over the floor-to-ceiling glass home windows of CVAD Gallery, and the doorways locked, the scholars mentioned, offering him with photograph and video documentation. When he checked the gallery’s web site and social media profiles, he observed that any point out of his exhibition had been eliminated.

“That’s after I realized one thing was very incorrect,” Quiñonez instructed ARTnews in a cellphone interview on Thursday evening.

On Wednesday night, he acquired an e-mail from Dlugosz-Acton, reviewed by ARTnews, stating, “I’m writing to let you realize that the college has terminated the artwork mortgage settlement with Boston College Artwork Galleries for ‘Ni de Aquí, Ni de Alla.’ The college is making preparations to return the exhibit to Boston College. Any actions related to the exhibition are now not obligatory. Nonetheless, please tell us when you’ve got incurred journey bills associated to the exhibition for reimbursement.”

No motive for the cancelation was given, and Dlugosz-Acton didn’t reply to any additional communication from Quiñonez or Boston College Artwork Galleries (BUAG), which originated the exhibition. Curated by Kate Fowle, the previous director of MoMA PS1 in New York and former chief curator of the Storage Museum of Up to date Artwork in Moscow, Quiñonez’s solo exhibition was on view at BUAG from September to December of final yr. It was to run at UNT’s CVAD Gallery via Could 1.

A number of requests for remark from ARTnews to each Dlugosz-Acton and UNT’s workplace of College Model Technique and Communications went unanswered. UNT did confirm the exhibition’s cancelation to the Denton Document-Chronicle, which first reported on the information.

Quiñonez mentioned that he had acquired an nameless e-mail through his web site from somebody claiming to be a UNT worker. “I don’t understand how official that is,” he mentioned. “In keeping with this e-mail, the School of Visible Arts and Design is censoring the exhibition on account of anti-ICE messaging. It says that they knew about it for at the very least per week, and that they’ve talked to all their workers, they usually requested the school to stay silent, to solely focus on their grievances with one another.”

If that is true, Quiñonez mentioned he believes his work has been censored. “It looks like a nationwide pattern proper now. Sadly, I’m not the primary artist to be censored, and I received’t be the final. It’s a direct violation of freedom of speech.”

Quiñonez additionally famous that this lack of communication is a whole about-face from the therapy he acquired lower than a month in the past when he visited UNT, shortly after the work had arrived in Texas however earlier than it had been uncrated. (Across the time of the exhibition’s opening in Boston, UNT’s Dlugosz-Acton had expressed curiosity in touring the present to Texas.)

“They had been excited in regards to the exhibition, they usually gave me a tour of the constructing,” he mentioned, noting that banners selling the present had been posted within the constructing. “They launched me to a number of college members at the moment. … I used to be even requested to jury their annual pupil exhibition.”

The exhibition’s title, “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá,” interprets to “neither from right here, nor from there” and is a decades-old sentiment usually expressed in Latinx diasporic communities about feeling such as you don’t belong both to your loved ones’s nation of origin or the nation you reside in now, in lots of circumstances the US. “We’ve all had that have,” Quiñonez mentioned. “I needed to make use of this exhibition to alter that right into a time period of endearment and proudly owning the truth that you’re from two locations that you simply love equally.”

“Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá,” which had been within the works for about two years earlier than its opening in Boston, featured a number of portray, sculpture, and set up work that Quiñonez described as diving into his lived expertise of rising up in Texas and seeing his father be deported by immigration authorities within the Nineteen Eighties.

“What holds Quinonez’s apply collectively is an insistence that politics and kind are inseparable. Coming into his exhibitions looks like strolling right into a metropolis of indicators. Each object, wall design, and floor carries weight,” Fowle wrote in a catalog essay for the exhibition.

Quinonez additionally needed to deliver it into the current, at a time when ICE raids and deportations are surging. “The exhibition doesn’t simply cowl all of the unhealthy issues which are occurring to our communities, but in addition celebrates our tradition, our humanity, our magnificence via storytelling,” he mentioned.

And Quiñonez needed to share that with Dallas–Fort Value, his hometown. “For me, it was an enormous deal,” he mentioned. “This could have been a monumental second, to come back again to the town the place I grew up, come again to the identical metropolis the place my father was deported, the place I used to be incarcerated at a really younger age for graffiti, and to actually present the work and the journey that I’ve been on since I’ve been gone—and produce it again dwelling.”

Along with seeing the work in his hometown, Quiñonez mentioned that he additionally felt that the present would have explicit resonance at UNT, a Hispanic-Serving Establishment whose pupil physique is 30 percent Hispanic. “It’s a disservice to college students and to individuals who had been wanting ahead to seeing the exhibition and feeling represented inside that exhibition as effectively,” he mentioned. “The coed physique at UNT is 30 p.c Latino, and I do know that this exhibition would have meant quite a bit for them—particularly proper now.”

“It’s essential for as many individuals as potential to see Victor’s work. It speaks for itself with nuance and sweetness,” Fowle instructed ARTnews on Friday.

Over the previous couple of years, Quiñonez, who received his begin as a road artist, has been on the rise inside the artwork world. Along with his first institutional solo present, he acquired the 2025 Frieze Los Angeles Affect Prize, which matches to an “an artist whose work has made a profound social affect,” according to the fair’s website. The award got here with $25,000 and a solo sales space finally yr’s version of Frieze LA, the place Quiñonez shared a brand new physique of labor, I.C.E. SCREAM by which brightly coloured sculptures formed like paletas have sticks printed with the ICE brand and the phrases “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement.” (ARTnews called it one of the best artist responses to the continuing ICE raids final yr.)

That work, which he developed whereas an artist in residence in 2024 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, makes use of paletas “as a sculpture to inform a narrative of our resilience,” he mentioned.

Quiñonez has additionally created a 22-foot set up within the form of a pyramid, manufactured from gold-painted ice coolers that road distributors carry round to move their wares. Titled Elevar La Cultura, a model of the work debuted on the Shed in New York in July 2025, earlier than exhibiting in Boston in tandem together with his exhibition at UBAG. It’s presently on view, via February 27, on the Latino Cultural Heart in Dallas as a part of a gaggle exhibition entitled “The Journey North: Hope, Labor and Tradition.”

Regardless of the exhibition’s cancelation, Quiñonez mentioned he felt much more resolved within the significance of his art-making. “I believe that the massive takeaway right here is that if artists are producing work that’s expressing the reality and exhibiting individuals a story that’s talking up towards any type of indecency or any type of violence towards different people, then that reality is price telling—even when it’s being suppressed,” he mentioned. “It makes the reality even that rather more essential. Seeing it suppressed validates it that rather more.”

Although his works are seemingly again on their method to Boston already, Quiñonez mentioned he hoped one other establishment may step in and tackle the exhibition.

“Proper now’s the time for establishments, museums, and galleries, to face on the fitting aspect of historical past,” he mentioned, “to assist artists who’re creating work that’s talking towards these injustices. Once they see one establishment fail, it’s as much as the remainder of these establishments to make issues proper and to assist the work that’s actually needing that assist proper now. It’s not a time to sit down again and to be silent.”