Woodbury House Honors Lee Quiñones with Landmark 'Outside is America' Show
Featuring decades-spanning work including his iconic subway murals and more recent unseen pieces.
Summary
- ‘Outside of America’ highlights Lee Quiñones’ longstanding practice of using art as a form of social commentary
- The landmark exhibition will feature his iconic subway murals to his more recent work that has never been shown to the public
London’s Woodbury House will host a monumental exhibition centering on he influential New York City-based, Puerto Rican artist Lee Quiñones. Entitled Outside is America, the presentation will highlight Quiñones’ longstanding practice of using art as a form of social commentary to highlight socio-political issues including nuclear war, poverty, racism and classism.
The exhibition will also shed light on his impactful contributions to the New York City street art movement such as his iconic subway car murals in 1974 to his developing artist years in the radiant East Village art scene in the ‘80s in ‘90s amidst his peers at the time, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Futura, Jenny Holzer and Martin Wong. “Lee’s practice, as well as those of his peers, largely emerged from neighbourhoods and communities that had been devastated by red lining, disinvestment and discriminatory lending policies,” stated Pedro Alonzo, the show’s curator.
Outside Is America will spotlight decades-spanning work by Quiñones encompassing paintings, drawings and his signature “tablet works” that consist of fragments of his studio walls inscribed with phrases, poems, paint testing bursts and sketches. Across his oeuvre, “he confronts systemic violence, misinformation, and the breakdown of political leadership on many levels,” said the gallery in a press release.
Highlights of the exhibition include “Red Dawn” (2021), a portrait of Red Cloud, the Lakota tribe leader, which injects indigenous Taino iconography and references the proverbrial phrase “get off my lawn” reconfigured as “get off my dawn.” Another work, entitled “No Strings Attached” (2021), the artist depicts Public Enemy’s Chuck D, who initially resembles a puppet under control, but the strings are actually cut if viewers were to analyze the painting further. The work is a comment on “the history of manipulation and physical displacement of marginalised communities, an introspection into one’s soul while calling for cultural agency and self-determination.”
“Art arrives at the time it deserves. A painting made twenty years ago may only make sense today. These works retrospectively carry forward conversations I’ve been having my whole life, about the human condition, about our collective hypocrisy, and how we can possibly move forward together,” said Quiñones.
The exhibition will go on view from October 20 to November 27.
Woodbury House
29 Sackville St.
London W1S 3DX, UK
