Vick Quezada
Artworks
Image credit: Argenis Apolinario, Bob Krasner
Juan Deere is a sculpture and a performance. Here, a converted commercial John Deere lawn mower has been transformed into a raised-bed garden of teosinte grass, retrofitted with a cascading steel frame. Long before European colonization, indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica, selectively bred teosinte grass to create modern-day corn (maize), a process that transformed agriculture. Corn became a critical crop, traded widely through extensive indigenous trade networks across North and South America. This early agricultural innovation remains one of the most important grains globally. Indigenous communities across the Americas have been instrumental in the development, evolution, and preservation of maize, which today’s industrial food system heavily depends on. At select times, Quezada will activate this sculpture with durational performances, during which they will mow the grass in the Park.
About the Artist
Vick Quezada (they/them) currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Art Practice at Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts and lives in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2022, Quezada was a Fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. In 2021, they received the prestigious US Latinx Art Forum Fellowship co-sponsored by Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and the Ford Foundation. In 2020 Quezada was hand selected from a “large-scale survey” of 40 emerging artists from the US and Puerto Rico to be featured in El Museo del Barrio’s groundbreaking, La Trienal. In 2019, Quezada was the artist-in-residence at New York University’s Latinx Project. Quezada was selected as the University Massachusetts at Amherst Contemporary Arts Curatorial Fellow in 2018, along with Fred Wilson, who curated the show “Five Takes on African Art”. Their work has been featured in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Art News, Trans Studies Quarterly:Duke University Press, and Remezcla. Quezada received a Bachelors from University Texas at El Paso and their MFA from University Massachusetts at Amherst.