Kevin Quiles Bonilla at Glyndor Gallery/Wave Hill House, NY

Kevin Quiles Bonilla, While you dried in the sand (palm trees, ocean breeze), 2022, custom print on beach towel. Courtesy of the artist.

Bronx, NY, April 26, 2022—A public garden and cultural center in the Bronx overlooking the Hudson River, Wave Hill’s landscape serves as a springboard for artists to create new art and reexamine ongoing bodies of work. For the Sunroom Project Space in Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill’s curators have commissioned six emerging, New York City-area artists to create site-specific installations.

Opening May 21, 2022, the windowed Sunroom and Sun Porch provide stimulating settings for artists to contemplate, explore and transform these spaces. This spring and summer feature Anina Major, Kevin Quiles Bonilla, Krystal DiFronzo and Heidi Norton, whose shows will examine colonial histories,familial and ancestral connections and cultural heritages in the context of nature. These are the first solo exhibitions in New York City for Major, Quiles Bonilla, and DiFronzo.

In Wave Hill House, 2020 Winter Workspace artist Maya Ciarrocchi exhibits recent bodies of work that examine various waterways in New York City, particularly the Bronx, revealing the centuries-long impact of urbanization and providing new perspectives on the past, present and future.

Kevin Quiles Bonilla, While you dried in the sand (palm trees, ocean breeze), 2022, custom print on beach towel. Courtesy of the artist.

Kevin Quiles Bonilla / Sunroom Project Space
May 21–July 4, 2022

Through installation and performance, Kevin Quiles Bonilla investigates notions of colonial history and consumption from the perspective of his Latinx cultural heritage, as well as from his lived experience as a queer artist and person with a disability. In the Sunroom, Quiles Bonilla’s A tropic squall blew in, while you dried in the sand explores the way that Puerto Rican culture and the tropical landscape are commodified and fetishized for the tourist industry and characterized predominately as a site of leisure.

Blending reality and fantasy, Quiles Bonilla’s project comprises custom-printed beach towels, sling chairs, imagery of Puerto Rico from postcards alongside documentation taken after Hurricane Maria, emergency radio announcements and a sand-covered floor. In the context of Wave Hill, this installation examines the beach, as well as the garden, as politically charged spaces. 

Quiles Bonilla is an interdisciplinary artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work has been presented in Puerto Rico, the United States, Mexico, China, Belgium, Japan, and Greece. Venues include the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, The 8th Floor, Dedalus Foundation, Smack Mellon and the Leslie-Lohman Museum, all in New York. He currently lives and works between Puerto Rico and New York. He received a BFA in photography from the University of Puerto Rico and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design.