Climate Immigrants - Phillips Exeter Academy

Hoesy Corona: Climate Immigrants

January 3 – March 2, 2024

Hoesy Corona is a Queer Latinx artist who creates multidisciplinary art spanning installation, sculpture, textile, and performance. His practice delves into pressing issues of our time, exploring topics such as climate crisis, queerness, immigration, and race. Corona approaches these poignant subjects by creating fabulated narratives highlighting the complex relationship between humans and the environment.

Hoesy Corona, Terrestrial 2 (Climate Immigrants series), 2023, Performance for the camera, Jacquard Weaving, Digital Collage, thread, hand cut vinyl

Climate Immigrants features a selection of work from Corona’s “Climate Ponchos” series. This ongoing body of work depicts ambiguous silhouettes moving through space using the archetype of the traveler. Each poncho depicts anonymous figures traversing through lush botanicals, coastal shores, and mountainscapes, while the extent or reasoning for their passage is undisclosed. Upon closer examination, each traveler is seen carrying personal belongings via suitcases and backpacks as they navigate through and adapt to the dilemma of climate-induced global migration. While each of Corona’s climate ponchos narrates individual stories of transit, they collectively conceptualize a larger account of climate-triggered journeying. Corona intentionally uses silhouettes to obscure identity and intentions, inviting the viewer to see themselves in each work and bear witness to the pursuit of a better life.

Hoesy Corona, Climate Poncho (leatherette 2), 2023, Performance for the camera, digital collage, sublimation on leatherette, leather cord

Aritst Bio:

Hoesy Corona is an artist and independent curator creating uncategorized and multidisciplinary art spanning installation, performance, and podcasting. Corona lived in Mexico, Utah, and Wisconsin before moving to Baltimore in 2005 to establish a professional practice in the arts. Hoesy was the founding Co-Director of Labbodies (2014-2020), a performance art laboratory focused on creating opportunities for under recognized queer and women artists of color to exhibit their work. He is the current founding co-host of La Valentina Podcast, a podcast and exhibition platform that celebrates queer Latinx artists and their accomplices in the art worlds.

He organizes and choreographs large-scale performances and installations that oftentimes quietly confront and delight viewers with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Reoccurring themes of queerness, race/class/gender, nature, isolation, celebration, and the climate crisis are present throughout his work. Hoesy has exhibited widely in galleries, museums, and public spaces in the United States and internationally.

Hoesy is a former George Kaiser Family Foundation Artist Fellow 2019-2020 in Tulsa, OK and a Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow 2017-2018 in Washington, DC. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including The Nicholson Project artist residency, The Mellon Foundation’s MAP Fund Grant, and the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Grit Fund Grant. He was awarded the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center Public Humanities Fellowship 2022-2023 at the Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries’ and was named the inaugural Restoring Hope, Restoring Trust Artist in Residence 2023 at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN. Hoesy is a current 2024 Pratt Artist in Residence at Enoch Pratt Free Central Library in Baltimore, MD.

View the Photo Gallery from the Climate Immigrants Exhibition.

Photo Gallery

Lamont Gallery programs are supported in part by the Michael C. Rockefeller ’56 Visiting Artists Fund.