Ronny Quevedo (he/him) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and now lives in the Bronx. He works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. Quevedo has had several solo exhibitions including no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum (2017); Home Field Advantage, Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, Bronx, New York (2015); and Ulama, Ule, Olé, Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami (2013). In 2018, Quevedo was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s group exhibition, Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. Quevedo received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003. He is currently artist in residence at Smack Mellon.

Fellowship Statement

The effect of relocation and displacement generates works about adaptation, memory and transformation. The movement and action within sports is a metaphor for an insistence on survival and constant adaptation. This use of play is a subversive transformation to the rules and capabilities placed upon people when the conditions of a society become oppressive. By incorporating these games, I invoke an architectural and narrative space—where boundaries are malleable, limits are negotiable and competition is a generative force for evolving identities.



The parallels between play and migration generate from indoor soccer leagues in New York City. Played on weekends at local public schools, these leagues are coordinated and operated by migrant Latin American and Caribbean communities. The questioning of inheritance and memory are conceptual markers in my practice. The act of passing—passing down, passing on, passing the ball—offers generative contemplations of my points of origin.



My focus for the fellowship is the dialectic of nomadism and cultural production as complemented by Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. He emphasizes the influence of the periphery onto central forms of culture. He claims that the margins offer a new understanding of the center. It can be more creative in determining meaning than a static position based on an essential form. I relate to this concept of being having been born in Ecuador, raised in The Bronx (a pre-dominantly Caribbean and Black community at that time) and determining my own identity as a migrant in relation to those who have similar experiences of displacement.

Photo by Argenis Apolinario.