Quisqueya Henriquez Issue #34

What do ice cream, seaweed, and soccer balls have in common? They’re all used in the Dominican artist’s work.

By Britt Julious
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Quisqueya Henriquez may not be the first artist to work with curious combinations, but she is the first to incorporate seawater ice cream into a sculpture, as she did for one of her standout pieces, “Caribbean Sea Water Ice Cream” (2002), for which she imported six gallons of water from the Dominican Republic. The ice cream is commentary on frequent stereotypes of people from the Caribbeanas “hot-blooded” and employs the artist’s most common tool: irony. “Irony is like a very strong instrument for people, for our political reality, our social reality,” Henriquez says.

Henriquez’s first U.S.solo show and museum survey of her work, Quisqueya Henriquez: The World Outside, showcases her 16-year career at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through January 2008. In it, she exhibits work incorporating a number of media, including constructions, installations, videos, sound art, photographs, and the documentation of participatory art. This broad array of media characterizes Henriquez’ approach to art. “The way I understand art is that I have an idea and I look for the best medium to work with that idea,” Henriquez says.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Henriquez, the daughter of a Cuban father and a Dominican Republic mother, flourished in an artistically inclined family. “From the very beginning, I wanted to be an artist,” she says.

Henriquez continuously weaves her Latin American background into her work. During her first time in Mexico, Henriquez chose to live without traditional art materials. This decision led to a series of photographs documenting honeycomb-pattern arrangements of seaweed from a Yucatán beach. “I was just in a new place, and I didn’t have all the materials that I wanted to work with,” Henriquez says. “I worked with what I found.” Other pieces in the exhibit include Jugando con la adversidad (Playing with Adversity) (2001–2006), a series of sculptures created using actual playing balls such as a basketball fashioned into a purse and a baseball gutted and ornamented as a fashionable cap.

To accompany the exhibit, Henriquez will be sending daily videos from Santo Domingo to the museum to document her life in the city. Additionally, an illustrated catalogue by Henriquez will be given to patrons. It will include critical essays and special-edition wrapping paper fashioned with images of trash photographed on the beaches of the Dominican Republic, similar to a piece she did in Santo Domingo. The wrapping paper is a subtle yet humorous critique on the current state of the treatment of the environment in the Dominican Republic. And in essence, that combination of humor and irony is what exemplifies Henriquez’ work. “It’s the idea that you talk about a dramatic situation but you don’t become dramatic,” Henriquez says. “I think it’s the strongest instrument an artist can have.”