After years of battling stomach cancer, prominent Dominican artist Quisqueya Henriquez died at the age of 58. She was born in Cuba, but lived and worked most of her life in the Dominican Republic.
She had studied art at the Faculty of Art of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo and the Higher Institute of Art (ISA) in Havana, Cuba. She worked in the mediums of sculpture, photography, sound art, installation art, video art, and collage. Henríquez participated in numerous international exhibitions and biennials.
Henríquez is known as an avant-garde artist who worked in the mediums of sculpture, photography, sound art, installation art, video art and collage. She was non-conventional and addressed issues such as adversity, the stigma of climate, race, ethnicity and gender as happening in Caribbean and Latin American cultures. She incorporated the colors and evolution of nature in her works.
She lived in the United States but returned to the Dominican Republic in 1997 to join the emerging art world. She resumed her participation in the Dominican art scene with a trailblazing artistic event, “Curador Curado” together with Fernando Varela and Jorge Pineda in 2001. Each artist served as a curator of another artist in the exhibit.
Los Peloteros, from 2006 was an artistic series that responded to her perceived need of helping people know where the Dominican Republic was located and that there was more in this country outside of baseball players. She said she carried out this series to respond to those who asked her if she would continue as an artist after relocating to the country following her stint in art in the United States. Los Peloteros was a series of collages made with images on baseball players taken from sports pages of newspapers.
Another of her most notable performance works was “De él Helado de agua de mar Caribe” (2002), at the Centro Leon, where ice cream was made with Caribbean sea water, whey, rum, coconut oil, blue color and stabilizers.
In 2007, the Bronx Museum of the Arts held the mid-career survey exhibition of her work titled, “Quisqueya Henríquez: The World Outside: A Survey Exhibition 1991–2007”. The exhibit would travel in 2008 to the Miami Art Museum (now Pérez Art Museum Miami).
Wikipedia reports Quisqueya Henríquez works can be found in museum and public collections including the El Museo del Barrio in New York City, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in Miami, Florida; the Pérez Art Museum Miami in Miami, Florida; Ninart Centro de Cultura in Mexico City, Mexico; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, Rhode Island.
Quisqueya Henriquez is the daughter of a Dominican father, historian Francisco Alberto Henriquez Vasquez (Chito), and was born when the family lived in Havana, in exile from the Trujillo regime. She lived most of her life in the Dominican Republic and chose to pass her last days after treatment in the United States did not revert her cancer. She was the wife of Samana senator, Pedro Catrain. Catrain is runner for reelection in the 19 May 2024 congressional election. Henriquez’s mother was Cuban Angelica Cruz. Both her parents are deceased.
She is recognized for her impact, influence and mentoring of emerging artists when in 2016 she created Sindicato, to support other artists.
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1 April 2024