Joann Quiñones

Website:

www.joannquinones.com

Biography:

Joann Quiñones is a Ceramics and Fiber artist who creates large scale figurative work in order to explore her Afro-Latinx identity. She was recently selected an Emerging Artist of 2020 by Ceramics Monthly, and is also a Manifest Gallery Annual Prize Finalist. Her work has been shown nationally, including in the 2020 NCECA Annual Exhibition, “The Burdens of History”. She has an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She currently teaches African American, Caribbean, and U.S. Literature at Earlham College in Richmond, IN.

Artist Statement:

For this body of work, I use the figure of the Topsy Turvy doll as a starting point to explore the internal contradictions of a queer, Afro-Latinx identity. The figures here are both human and doll-like, sometimes oversized, and imaginary. They consist of hybrid forms and memories, carefully alluding to what it means to be both and neither – black, Puerto Rican, a citizen, a woman, and queer. In terms of process, I am drawn to mold making as an expression of the desire to fill in the blanks of history. A mold creates a copy and an original. And ultimately, a casting is made when a liquid is poured into a cavity and left to harden. The result is an object that is solid on the surface and hollow on the inside, an apt metaphor for the impossible pursuit of charting identity. These figures are set against backdrops and objects associated with the home in order to ask the viewer how narratives of the domestic, family, and womanhood are complicated by a history of slavery, stolen labor, and consumption in the U.S and Caribbean.