About this Event
This conversation, moderated by Natalia Viera Salgado, Associate Curator, brings together the practices of artists Lizania Cruz, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Ronny Quevedo to explore the politics of migration, belonging, and memory across the Americas. Through participatory projects, healing rituals, and reimagined cartographies, these artists engage with personal and collective histories shaped by displacement, colonial legacies, and diasporic experience. By reflecting on the intersections of art, and lived experience, the talk invites audiences to think critically about how memory is preserved, contested, and reconfigured in relation to the ongoing realities of migration.
This program is organized in conjunction with the exhibition , on view October 16, 2025 - January 10, 2026.
RESERVATIONS: Admission is free but reservations are required.
ACCESSIBILITY: This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs. To request free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service, email your request at least three weeks in advance of the event to [email protected].
About the Speakers
Lizania Cruz (she/her) is a Dominican participatory artist and designer interested in how migration affects ways of being & belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience engagement, she creates projects that expand and share pluralistic narratives on migration. Cruz received the 2023 New York City Artadia Award and her newest project was commissioned by The Shed for Open Call 2023. In 2021, Cruz was part of ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at el Museo del Barrio, the first national survey of Latinx artists by the institution. Most recently, she was part of 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at the Aldrich Museum. She has presented solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, CUE Art Foundation, International Studio & Curatorial Program, ISCP, Alma Lewis and Proxyco Gallery. Her work has been exhibited at Sharjah’s First Design Biennale, Untitled, Art Miami Beach, The Highline, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and more. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Fuse News, KQED arts, Dazed Magazine, Garage Magazine and the New York Times.
Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976) grounds his transdisciplinary practice of sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation in activism and healing. Engaging a wide variety of visual cultures, Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, referencing his unaccompanied, undocumented migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War. Across all media, Maravilla explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. Maravilla received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Brooklyn Museum among others, including his solo exhibition Les soñadores, currently on view at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA.
Ronny Quevedo’s (b.1981) multidisciplinary practice spans installation, drawings, and prints. Crucially, Quevedo’s family histories serve as prompts to consider the socio-political implications of migration while reenvisioning pre- and post-colonial Andean iconographies. Throughout his work, Quevedo both recuperates indigenous languages of abstraction and revalorizes of their associated labor.
Quevedo’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group presentations at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. His work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Denver Art Museum, CO; Minneap
Natalia Viera Salgado is a Puerto Rican curator and curatorial consultant based in New York City. She is also the founder of :Pública Espacio Cultural, an independent art space in Alto del Cabro, Santurce Puerto Rico. Her art historical research focuses on contemporary art concerning decolonial practices, architecture, social and environmental justice, and new media with a keen interest in hybrid and interdisciplinary projects. She has worked at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, El Museo del Barrio, Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Americas Society. Viera holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts and is currently the Associate Curator at the National Academy of Design and a curatorial Resident at the Abrons Arts Center, under the program La Residencia. Among Viera’s recent projects is , a publication with around 20 contributors that focuses on Puerto Rico’s water issues from a decolonial perspective.
Image: Lizania Cruz, Obituaries of the American Dream, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
National Academy of Design, 519 West 26th Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
