Courtesy David Castillo
Quisqueya Henríquez, whose perplexing installations and sculptures contained a humorous edge, died on Saturday in Santo Domingo at the age of 57. Henríquez’s cause of death was stomach cancer, according to the Dominican outlet Diario Libre, which first reported the news.
The artist’s passing was first confirmed by Henríquez’s spouse, Pedro Catrain, a senator for the Samaná province, and later announced by Miami’s David Castillo Gallery, which will represent her estate.
Born in 1966 in Havana, Henríquez was one of four children born to a Dominican historian and Cuban mother. Raised in the Dominican Republic, she went on to study in her home country at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and graduated later from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 1992 before becoming an artist.
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Her works of the ’90s utilized found materials like sports equipment and amateur footage shot in Santo Domingo. In 1998 a review in Artforum described her installations as “perceptual riddles, intellectual traps intended to confuse the senses.”
Between 2001 and 2006, she made a series of sculptures called “Playing with Adversity,” for which she altered everyday objects—hollowing a basketball out, for instance, or carving into a woman’s purse to remake it into a headpiece. The sculpture series would become the centerpiece of a 2007 show at the Bronx Museum. At the time of the exhibition she was already established as a key figure in Latin American art, but she was relatively little-known in the United States.
Across much of her art, she retained a sense of humor, even as she invoked critical theory. “I am doing a parody with a hint of humor as I am not interested in victimizing myself about what it is to be an artist in the Caribbean or in Latin American,” she once said in an interview.
“In my view, a major contribution of Quisqueya was her visionary decision to work outside of a major art center. This on the one hand made things more difficult, but also gave her work a personal quality,” Castillo told ARTnews. He added, “her work did not follow a trend.”
Correction, April 4, 2024: An earlier version of this article misreported Quisqueya Henríquez’s age at the time of her death. She was 57, not 58.
