Raquel Paiewonsky (born 1969) is an artist from the

Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic ( ; es, República Dominicana, ) is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares wit ...

Early life and education

Born in Puerto Plata, Paiewonsky graduated in 1991 from the Altos de Chavón School of Design in La Romana. The following year she held her first solo exhibition at the Art Nouveau Gallery. She then traveled to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, where she lived and worked for a decade, studying at

Parsons The New School for Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

. After returning to the Dominican Republic she settled in

Santo Domingo , total_type = Total , population_density_km2 = auto , timezone = AST (UTC −4) , area_code_type = Area codes , area_code = 809, 829, 849 , postal_code_type = Postal codes , postal_code = 10100–10699 (Distrito Nacional) , websi ...

Career

Stylistically, Paiewonsky produces art across a range of disciplines and media, including painting, sculpture, and photography. She has exhibited work in many venues both in the Dominican Republic and abroad, in solo and group shows, and has been included in the National Visual Arts Biennial of Santo Domingo on multiple occasions. She received the Gran Premio Eduardo León award for her work in 2006, 2008, and 2012. Among the collections featuring her work are the Daros-Latinoamérica, Zürich; the

Rhode Island School of Design Museum The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum) is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877, and still shares multiple build ...

, Rhode Island; Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and the Centro León, Santiago, Dominican Republic. She is also a co-founder of the art collective Quintipata, which includes Pascal Meccariello, Jorge Pineda, and Belkis Ramírez in its ranks. Paiewonsky had an exhibition of her mixed media work on breasts at the UMD Gallery in 2019. Paiewonsky described how her work inquired into how changing cultural structures and stereotypes impacted human bodies and capacities for being.

Personal life

Trained as a vegetarian chef as well as an artist, she is married with two sons. With her sister she owns a number of businesses in the Dominican Republic.

References

{{DominicanRepublic-bio-stub 1969 births Living people 20th-century Dominican Republic painters 20th-century Dominican Republic artists Dominican Republic women painters 21st-century painters 20th-century women artists 21st-century women artists Dominican Republic people of Lithuanian descent People from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic Parsons School of Design alumni White Dominicans