The New Postcolonial: Joey Quiñones’s Maroon at the Sculpture Center

Walking into The Sculpture Center’s largest gallery a few weeks ago, I was startled by the clear sightline to a monumental, bare-chested Queen Victoria. She looks proudly over the exhibition space as if it were her colonial domain, full skirts belying a row of burdened, black feet. The black bodies that hold this heavy cast body upright are lined up like soldiers and tread on Spanish tile, Victoria becoming the literal figurehead of European colonial power while the enslaved people on which this power rests are reduced to their utility.

This sculpture, entitled El Mito del Regreso (The Myth of the Return) (2019), was made by Afro-Puerto Rican artist Joey Quiñones as part of the poetically disturbing exhibition Maroon, on view at the Sculpture Center through January 17^th, along with the dozens of similarly masterful works subjected to Victoria’s imposing gaze. Though this exhibition indeed deals with horrific histories, often with dark humor and a brutal honesty, it juxtaposes the sinister with the kitsch, interweaving these histories with both the oppression and the resilience of intersectionally marginalized groups today. Such complex storytelling undoubtedly comes from Quiñones’s educational and professional background: they earned a PhD in English from the University of Iowa and only then pursued their MFA. Dismantling the boundaries between fine art, decorative art, and craft through material, Quiñones’s practice in turn questions all systems that hierarchize. Quiñones provides us here with a crucial statement for our time.

With clear influences from artists who interpolate the colonial and post-colonial moment, such as Ghanaian-British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah and particularly British-Nigerian mixed-media artist Yinka Shonibare, who is known to incorporate colonial fabrics and other materials which index forced migration and colonization. (Cleveland audiences will recall Shonibare’s installation of approximately 6000 books–The American Library—at Cleveland Public Library was a highlight of FRONT Triennial 2018.)  Like Shonibare, Quiñones  uses wax-print cloth in a few of their pieces. Yet while the works of Akomfrah and Shonibare both are consonant with their identities as members of the West African diaspora in the United Kingdom, Quiñones broadens the conversation trans-Atlantically and intersectionally. Recentering issues of history and identity in the Caribbean and in Black America, Quiñones deftly weaves history into the present, queerness into Blackness, and the personal into the collective. Their œuvre, though appearing to draw heavily on Shonibare, seems to surpass such canonical work through  the sheer complexity of the issues with which it is concerned.

This is perhaps most evident in two of the works in the show from Quiñones’s series Americanoiseries, Cast Iron II (2025) and Carolina Gold (2022). At once ornately adorned and disturbing memorials, they are as gruesome as the head of John the Baptist on a platter and as arresting as the face of a gorgon. Cast Iron II evokes the process of creating the piece, the color of Black skin, and the cookware materials enslaved women would have used in their domestic labor. Carolina Gold speaks to gold as wealth, as in the use of the mnemonic “Gold, Glory, God” to describe European colonial motivations. Yet it also references the South Carolinian rice varietal, brought from Madagascar to be used as a cash crop from the seventeenth century. Gold, bodies, rice: each weathers the Middle Passage, all are served tidily on platters set on antique tables. The material here speaks of  food  and human bodies, both becoming plantation commodities.

Indeed, among the most compelling aspects of Quiñones’s work is how they use materials. In a series of geographically evocative masks, we follow the African Diaspora through the Puerto-Rican folk tradition of the vejigante, a masquerade which encodes both oppression and cultural resistance. In vejigante, the mask-wearer is thought to embody a demon. Yet in the Middle Ages, the vejigante was not a nonspecific evil, but a racial Other, representing the “Moors,” or Black Africans, whom Saint James was said to have battled and defeated. Each of Quiñones’ Vejigantes is named a different racial category imposed by a colonial power—Mulatto (2021), Vieja (2021), Mestizo (2021)—seemingly corresponding with locations known for their mixed heritages. New Orleans, New Mexico, and the American Deep South emerge in their gold gilt, clay tiling, and floral chintz. Each mask showcases the vejigante’s characteristic tentacles and is encircled with a halo not unlike natural Black hair in form, referencing its expressive resistance. The series vacillates between a pestilent, traumatic past in which mixed identities are construed as monstrous and a resilient future of reclaiming the power of such identities.

Set at odds with each other, two quilts, one with a cowboy proclaiming his place on American soil and another with the first Black American postwoman, Mary Fields, armed with her trusty shotgun. The viewer is confronted with the cowboy’s question, “Why do I feel free on Native land?” and asked what measures must be taken to create freedom for all. Both figures operate in a sort of queer sphere, with the Black cowboy co-opted in contemporary queer, Black culture, and Fields herself reportedly spending more time in saloons and with her shotgun than in company of women. Quiñones’s intersectionality here proclaims, in the mode of Fannie Lou Hamer, that “no one is free until everyone is free,” demanding an interrogation of American “freedom” in particular, requiring that viewers confront their complicity and understand its price.

Before the monumental, imposing shadow of the Victoria sculpture, in the sea of open floor space, a boat-like volume covered in silk roses either rises or sinks, black hands reaching upwards from within it. These hands, like Victoria’s feet, feature as severed synecdoches of labor. Elsewhere, in Reliquary for Marsha P. Johnson II (2025), they bear the gendered dignity of pearl-painted nails yet are set on pedestals of white, Neoclassical propriety. In Trophy (2025), hands, set on a shelf like spoils of conquest, morph from black to porcelain white. Blackness—cultural, familial, and even genetic—is erased as generations of families are separated, Black women are raped by their enslavers, and as survivors are forced to “pass” as white to get by in a world defined by their oppressors. Quiñones thus questions the nature of propriety on white terms and reminds viewers of its history.

Drawing on the sinister aesthetics of Manifest Destiny and the plantation, juxtaposing this with an opulence both morbid and campy, Quiñones’s work comes at a crucial time in our nation’s history, reminding us of the many-faceted horrors of American oppression, yet presenting us with the undeniable, indefatigable Black and queer spirits of our shared history. Maroon is a must-see, not just for Clevelanders, but for citizens of the world. This is post-colonial art’s new generation.

Sarah Frisbie is a student working toward a PhD in the Art History program at Case Western Reserve University, and the recipient of a Fall 2025 CAN Journal Broadening the Conversation fellowship for young writers.

Joey Quiñones: Maroon
November 21, 2025 – January 17, 2026
The Sculpture Center
12210 Euclid Ave
Cleveland, OH 44106
info@sculpturecenter.org
216.229.6527