University of North Texas Cancels Victor Quiñonez Exhibition, Artist Claims Censorship over Anti-ICE Content in His Work
The exhibition was intended to be a homecoming for artist Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez who grew up in the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area. The excitement built when he got the first batch of images showing his traveling solo exhibition being installed at the University of North Texas’s CVAD Gallery. Quiñonez was looking forward to receiving images of the work being fully installed and was working on managing the RSVPs for an opening reception to take place this month.
Then, silence.
Quiñonez continued to follow up with the university gallery’s director Stefanie Dlugosz-Acton. The exhibition was scheduled to open on February 3, but Quiñonez is unclear if that actually happened. It wasn’t until he began receiving DMs from UNT students, asking if it was closed or there was additional work being done on it. The blinds had been drawn over the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of CVAD Gallery, and the doors locked, the students said, providing him with photo and video documentation. When he checked the gallery’s website and social media profiles, he noticed that any mention of his exhibition had been removed.
“That’s when I realized something was very wrong,” Quiñonez told ARTnews in a phone interview on Thursday night.
On Wednesday evening, he received an email from Dlugosz-Acton, reviewed by ARTnews, stating, “I am writing to let you know that the university has terminated the art loan agreement with Boston University Art Galleries for ‘Ni de Aquí, Ni de Alla.’ The university is making arrangements to return the exhibit to Boston University. Any activities associated with the exhibition are no longer necessary. However, please let us know if you have incurred travel expenses related to the exhibition for reimbursement.”
No reason for the cancelation was given, and Dlugosz-Acton did not respond to any further communication from Quiñonez or Boston University Art Galleries (BUAG), which originated the exhibition. Curated by Kate Fowle, the former director of MoMA PS1 in New York and former chief curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Quiñonez’s solo exhibition was on view at BUAG from September to December of last year. It was to run at UNT’s CVAD Gallery through May 1.
Multiple requests for comment from ARTnews to both Dlugosz-Acton and UNT’s office of University Brand Strategy and Communications went unanswered. UNT did confirm the exhibition’s cancelation to the Denton Record-Chronicle, which first reported on the news.
Quiñonez said that he had received an anonymous email via his website from someone claiming to be a UNT employee. “I don’t know how official this is,” he said. “According to this email, the College of Visual Arts and Design is censoring the exhibition due to anti-ICE messaging. It says that they knew about it for at least a week, and that they have talked to all their employees, and they asked the faculty to remain silent, to only discuss their grievances with each other.”
If this is true, Quiñonez said he believes his work has been censored. “It seems like a national trend right now. Unfortunately, I’m not the first artist to be censored, and I won’t be the last. It’s a direct violation of freedom of speech.”
Quiñonez also noted that this lack of communication is a complete about-face from the treatment he received less than a month ago when he visited UNT, shortly after the work had arrived in Texas but before it had been uncrated. (Around the time of the exhibition’s opening in Boston, UNT’s Dlugosz-Acton had expressed interest in traveling the show to Texas.)
“They were excited about the exhibition, and they gave me a tour of the building,” he said, noting that banners promoting the show were posted in the building. “They introduced me to several faculty members at that time. … I was even asked to jury their annual student exhibition.”
The exhibition’s title, “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá,” translates to “neither from here, nor from there” and is a decades-old sentiment often expressed in Latinx diasporic communities about feeling like you don’t belong either to your family’s country of origin or the country you live in now, in many cases the United States. “We’ve all had that experience,” Quiñonez said. “I wanted to use this exhibition to change that into a term of endearment and owning the fact that you’re from two places that you love equally.”
“Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá,” which had been in the works for about two years before its opening in Boston, featured a selection of painting, sculpture, and installation work that Quiñonez described as diving into his lived experience of growing up in Texas and seeing his father be deported by immigration authorities in the 1980s.
“What holds Quinonez’s practice together is an insistence that politics and form are inseparable. Entering his exhibitions feels like walking into a city of signs. Every object, wall design, and surface carries weight,” Fowle wrote in a catalog essay for the exhibition.
Quinonez also wanted to bring it into the present, at a time when ICE raids and deportations are surging. “The exhibition doesn’t just cover all the bad things that are happening to our communities, but also celebrates our culture, our humanity, our beauty through storytelling,” he said.
And Quiñonez wanted to share that with Dallas–Fort Worth, his hometown. “For me, it was a huge deal,” he said. “This would have been a monumental moment, to come back to the city where I grew up, come back to the same city where my father was deported, where I was incarcerated at a very young age for graffiti, and to really show the work and the journey that I’ve been on since I’ve been gone—and bring it back home.”
In addition to seeing the work in his hometown, Quiñonez said that he also felt that the show would have particular resonance at UNT, a Hispanic-Serving Institution whose student body is 30 percent Hispanic. “It’s a disservice to students and to people who were looking forward to seeing the exhibition and feeling represented within that exhibition as well,” he said. “The student body at UNT is 30 percent Latino, and I know that this exhibition would have meant a lot for them—especially right now.”
“It’s important for as many people as possible to see Victor’s work. It speaks for itself with nuance and beauty,” Fowle told ARTnews on Friday.
Over the past couple of years, Quiñonez, who got his start as a street artist, has been on the rise within the art world. In addition to his first institutional solo show, he received the 2025 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize, which goes to an “an artist whose work has made a profound social impact,” according to the fair’s website. The award came with $25,000 and a solo booth at last year’s edition of Frieze LA, where Quiñonez shared a new body of work, I.C.E. SCREAM in which brightly colored sculptures shaped like paletas have sticks printed with the ICE logo and the words “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement.” (ARTnews called it one of the best artist responses to the ongoing ICE raids last year.)
That work, which he developed while an artist in residence in 2024 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, uses paletas “as a sculpture to tell a story of our resilience,” he said.
Quiñonez has also created a 22-foot installation in the shape of a pyramid, made of gold-painted ice coolers that street vendors carry around to transport their wares. Titled Elevar La Cultura, a version of the work debuted at the Shed in New York in July 2025, before showing in Boston in tandem with his exhibition at UBAG. It is currently on view, through February 27, at the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas as part of a group exhibition entitled “The Journey North: Hope, Labor and Culture.”
Despite the exhibition’s cancelation, Quiñonez said he felt even more resolved in the importance of his art-making. “I think that the big takeaway here is that if artists are producing work that is expressing the truth and showing people a narrative that is speaking up against any kind of indecency or any kind of violence toward other humans, then that truth is worth telling—even if it’s being suppressed,” he said. “It makes the truth even that much more important. Seeing it suppressed validates it that much more.”
Though his works are likely back on their way to Boston already, Quiñonez said he hoped another institution might step in and take on the exhibition.
“Right now is the time for institutions, museums, and galleries, to stand on the right side of history,” he said, “to support artists who are creating work that is speaking against these injustices. When they see one institution fail, it’s up to the rest of these institutions to make things right and to support the work that’s really needing that support right now. It’s not a time to sit back and to be silent.”
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