ARTS HIGHLIGHT
VICTOR “MARKA27” QUIÑONEZ ’03 BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts
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Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez ’03 is a self-dubbed “prolific artisan” whose work spans illustration, graffiti, fashion design, mixed-media installations, his own line of toys, and an award-winning creative agency, Street Theory, that he founded and runs with his wife Liza Quiñonez. “A huge influence on my personal work is the ability to think like an illustrator, and a product designer, and a fine artist,” he explains, “and to combine all of those things when working on a piece…to create something very unique.” Victor’s “Neo-Indigenous” style is unmistakable, whether in his commissioned murals around the world, his gallery exhibitions, or his work in fashion design: powerful imagery drawing on graffiti and street culture, boldly mixing pop culture and traditional Mexican imagery, with the purpose of “engaging an audience in a dialogue on cultural authenticity driven by self-expression.” The School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) gave Victor a head start on his early career—working for companies like Nike and Converse—by posing real-world assignments as opposed to “boring and basic stuff.” Practicing faculty-artists also helped connect Victor to the gallery world. He recalls an early encounter with Kehinde Wiley, who
was just emerging into his career and came to SMFA as a visiting artist. “At the time I was very anti-tradition. I was working with spray paint 90% of the time and I was painting these huge murals throughout Boston,” he remembers. “Kehinde was one of those people who would question what you were doing. He was trying to get you to open up [and] explore other mediums to take your work in different directions, because every medium has its advantages and disadvantages. I think back to that conversation and I’m glad I was able to meet people like that through SMFA.” SMFA’s open curricular structure encouraged experimentation. Victor remembers hearing from friends at other art institutions who were pigeonholed into a single discipline and its resources. Meanwhile, at SMFA, a photographer could experiment with mixed media, or create a silkscreen with their photography, without even needing to be enrolled in a corresponding class. “You could just talk to the instructor, set up a time, and go do it,” Victor says. This acceptance and support of complexity, of the manifold nature of any artistic practice, applied to the community as a whole. According to Victor, “Another thing that I really
PHOTO BY GABRIEL ORTIZ
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