Josué Guarionex
Josué Guarionex is a self-taught sculptor whose artistic formation began within his family: his mother is a fashion designer, and his father was a woodworker and luthier. He studied civil engineering at the University of Puerto Rico in Ponce (1991), later pursued diesel mechanics, and in 1996 studied photography at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. During this time, professor Nitza Luna recommended him to Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano, with whom he worked as an assistant.
Guarionex also collaborated with Pulitzer Prize–nominated photographer Jorge Ramírez on advertising, underwater, and commercial photography projects. He coordinated several photographic productions, including the 1997 advertising campaign for the Puerto Rico and St. Croix U.S. Virgin Islands Tourism Company.
After relocating to New York City in 2000, Guarionex became an active member of the Puerto Rican artistic community in El Barrio/Spanish Harlem and began an audiovisual project documenting Afro-Puerto Rican music. In 2003, he returned to Puerto Rico and founded his furniture design studio, Guarionex Design. His first exhibition of wood sculptures, Rollingpin = Espacios Ideales, was presented at Guatíbiri Gallery in Río Piedras in 2009.
In 2011, Guarionex moved back to New York, where he began exploring new artistic languages using found materials and participated in projects as an organizer and co-curator. He was selected for an artist residency at the Andrew Freedman Home and received Bronx Recognizes Its Own in Sculpture from the Bronx Council on the Arts. His work Crosscut (2020) is a permanent interactive public artwork commissioned by the MTA, Mount Vernon, New York.
His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, BAAD, Andrew Freedman Home, Bronx Art Space, Hostos Community College, Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center, HACO Gallery, El Museo de las Américas (IV Biennial of Photography, San Juan), and cultural institutions in the Dominican Republic.
Artworks
Project rendering for La Carreta Made a U-Turn, 2026
Guarionex’s work is inspired by the literary legacy of René Marqués (Puerto Rico) and Jesús “Tato” Laviera (New York). La Carreta Made a U-Turn takes its title from Laviera’s 1979 poetry collection, written in response to Marqués’s emblematic play La Carreta (1953). From different contexts, both authors address Puerto Rican migration and the tensions between identity, nostalgia, and belonging.
The sculpture, a full-scale cart constructed in modular wood and iron and shaped into a “U,” symbolizes the constant back-and-forth movement of migrant communities. This turn does not merely suggest a physical or symbolic return to origin, but rather a gesture of resistance: a redefinition of direction in response to the historical, economic, and political forces that drive displacement.
La Carreta embodies the duality of movement: departure and return, loss and reconstruction, homeland and exile. Its form suggests that the journey never truly ends and that identity is continuously reshaped in transit.