Neveah Marquez: SagradX

SAGRAD_X_ collapses the boundaries between the sacredness of private and public life through the interactions of the personal, Queer, Latinx and institutional. Across painting, durational performance, photography, sculpture and installation, Neveah Marquez searches for enduring and ephemeral ways to capture, preserve and present what is held sacred. In her first solo exhibition, artist Neveah Marquez (b. Neveah Carlos Hernandez-Marquez Jr) asks how sacredness is created, who gets to define it, whom it protects, and what remains after it has been desecrated. Its title transforms the gendered Spanish words sagrado/a through the open-ended X, in an act that is both linguistic and political to expand the sacred beyond fixed categories of gender, religion and institutional authority. Audiences are repeatedly invited to consider their own relationship to sacredness and, through looking, touching, listening, and participating, are given the freedom to encounter the divine on their own terms.