William Cordova and Lee Quiñones

During William Cordova’s artist residency at the Neiman Center in 2019 he invited the legendary graffiti artist, Lee Quiñones, to the printshop to collaborate on physical graffiti, a large-scale screenprint of Lower East Side tenement buildings that was appropriated from the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album of the same name. Cordova collaged cut photographs to the surface of the image and added rough marks in oil stick and paint marker to its margins. Quiñones was then given free reign to“tag” the building’s facade. Using a stencil and spray paint, Quiñones added his tag to a different location and with a unique color combination on each print in the edition.

William Cordova (b. 1969, Lima, Peru) received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and an MFA from Yale University in 2004. His work has been the focus of solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad at institutions including Davison College, Davison, NC; 80M2 Lima, Peru; and MDC Museum of Art + Design at Miami Dade College, Miami, FL. He has participated in numerous artist residencies including Artpace, San Antonio, TX; The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausaliton, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and American Academy in Berlin, Germany, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of America Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Yale Art Gallery, New Haven; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; to name a few. Cordova lives and works in Miami.

Lee Quiñones (b. 1960, Ponce, Puerto Rico) is among the most influential artists to emerge from the New York City subway and street art movement of the 1970s. He is a celebrated figure in both the contemporary art world and pop culture circles.  Quiñones’s paintings are in the permanent collection of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Museum of the City of New York; the Groninger Museum, Groninger, The Netherlands;  and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad at institutions including the New Museum, NY; the Museum of National Monuments, Paris, France; and Staatliche Museum, Berlin, Germany.