ARTS

Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez ’03 is a self-dubbed “prolic artisan” whose work spans illustration, grafti, 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 inuence on my personal work is the ability to think like an illustrator, and a product designer, and a ne 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 graf- ti 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

respect about SMFA is how incredibly diverse [it is] in terms of the students…that they allow to have a platform or voice. It doesn’t matter what gender you are, how you identify. You know, me being a Mexican artist and dealing with subject matter of immigration and politics, that’s all encouraged.”

Victor’s career didn’t jump right from being a student to running Street Theory with co-founder Liza Quiñonez. But each role taught him something that carried him to the next step. “I got my rst job doing graphics for a fashion company, which led me to packaging design, which later got me into designing for a toy company, which eventually got me to designing my own toys.” Those toys actually gave him one of his rst experiences of being featured in a major international museum. “I think every artist’s big-time goal is to get into a museum…and the rst time I had a taste of that was when I was on a trip to London with a company I was working for and I visited the Tate. Randomly, one of the toys that I designed was in their gift shop! That kind of blew my mind.”

Not every job was glamorous. Victor remembers working as a janitor at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum while he was attending SMFA. While buffing oors, he’d look at the Renaissance paintings

hanging there and think, “All these guys have been dead and gone for such a long time and they have no idea that their work has carried on for all these decades.” Things came full circle in 2018 when Victor was invited back to the Gardner Museum as a luminary, an honor given to Boston’s most innovative artists and cultural leaders.

“I just want to let students with backgrounds like mine know that the struggle makes you stronger and smarter than people who are just handed opportunities,” he says. “I think that if there are students that feel like, ‘I want to go to art school, but it’s going to be hard,’ I just want to tell them that it’ll be worth it in the end.”

Even though Street Theory keeps Victor and Liza busy, they still nd the time to curate a space in the South End dedicated to murals and public art called Underground at Ink Block. This urban park provides opportunities for local, national, and international artists to leave their mark through impactful public projects. Thankful for the support he received early on, Victor still prioritizes providing opportunities to a new generation of aspiring artists—another way in which the omnidirectional comes full circle. —THOMAS DUNCAN, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS, SMFA AT TUFTS