Joey Quiñones Named Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art
Source: Cranbrook Academy of Art Press Room
Bloomfield Hills, Mich., March 23, 2023 – Today, Paul Sacaridiz, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Director of Cranbrook Academy of Art, announced that Joey Quiñones has been named the new Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Fiber Department. Quiñones replaces Mark Newport, who will be leaving the Academy to pursue full-time studio practice.
Quiñones is an accomplished artist working across a wide range of materials, whose work focuses on African American and Caribbean history, as well as the intricacies of Afro-Latinx identity. They hold an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. Most recently, they established the Fibers and Mixed Media studio in the Sculpture Dimensional Studies Division at Alfred University, where they served as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture. Prior to teaching at Alfred, Quiñones spent 17 years teaching English at Earlham College in Indiana.
As an artist, they have been the recipient of numerous residencies, including at the Vermont Studio Center, the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Delaware; and the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. They have shown their work widely, with recent and upcoming exhibitions at the Belger Arts Center, the Akron Arts Museum, the Winterthur Museum, the University of Minnesota, and DePauw University, among others. They were named a 2020 Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly in recognition of their cross-disciplinary work and were a finalist for the Manifest Gallery Annual Prize. They also received an Honorable Mention for the James Renwick Alliance Chrysalis Award.
In the recent exhibition La Gruta/The Grotto at Belger Arts Center, Quiñones discusses how their work explores the importance of the highly ritualized practices of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. The work in the exhibition is an invitation to contemplate narratives of the domestic, family, and womanhood – and how they are complicated by a history of slavery, stolen labor, and racism, particularly in the U.S. and the Caribbean. They use materials that have historical and personal significance, saying, “I work with all materials, but consider fibers and ceramics to be foundational to my process and thinking because of their long history and aesthetic traditions in places like West Africa, Spain, and the Americas.”
