Quinsy Gario

Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten. His artistic work centers on decolonial remembering and instituting otherwise. He is a member of the collective Family Connection, co-founded in 2005 by his mother Glenda Martinus. With the collective Gario has researched and presented work on resistance, recovery and refusal as practiced through history by the racially oppressed on the Caribbean islands that have continued Dutch colonization in common. The collective’s presentations center on fugitivity through various means. Gario’s most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012) and fundamentally altered a racist Dutch tradition.

Gario did his undergraduate studies in theater, film and television studies and completed minors in gender studies and postcolonial studies at the Utrecht University. He is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague. He is a 2017 Humanity in Action Detroit Fellow, 2017/2018 BAK Fellow, 2019/2020 APASS alumnus and a 2020/2021 Sandberg Institute Critical Studies Fellow. Gario received among others the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in among other places Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), TENT (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Gothenburg). In 2021 Gario also ran for a seat in Dutch parliament. He is currently doing research on artistic and curatorial engagements with ethnographic collections by artists from the Caribbean islands that have continued Dutch colonization in common.

Photo by Annemarija Gulbe