University of North Texas Students Withdraw Thesis Shows Due to Alleged Censorship
Graduate students in the MFA Studio Art program at the University of North Texas (UNT) are withdrawing their upcoming thesis presentations in solidarity with artist Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, whose exhibition at the school was abruptly canceled without explanation. Quiñonez’s solo show at the College of Visual Arts and Design (CVAD) featured sculptures and installations that draw from his Mexican-American upbringing and probe the pervasive violence against immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá — Spanish for “neither from here nor from there,” a reference to the duality of diasporic existence — opened on February 3 and was slated to remain on view until May 1.
But the week after the opening, visitors to the gallery found its windows papered over. On the school’s website, the exhibition page had been taken down. Quiñonez received official notice of his show’s cancellation only days later, on February 11, via a four-line email informing him that his works were being returned to Boston University, where the exhibition was first presented. UNT has yet to issue any public statement or explain to the artist why his work is no longer on view. The school has not responded to Hyperallergic’s multiple requests for comment.
Outrage over the show’s sudden closure and fears that it may have been censored for including works critical of ICE have sparked protest actions and missives to leadership in the last week. On Monday morning, dozens of students and alumni dressed in black arranged a Mexican flag and candles in a “vigil” at the shuttered exhibition’s entrance. Students held a “vigil” action in solidarity with Victor Quiñonez. (photo courtesy Sierra Rose Dominguez)
Out of 11 students in the Studio Art MFA cohort who are graduating this year, nine have committed to withdrawing their upcoming thesis shows, said Carla Hughes, one such student and a teaching fellow at UNT. Hughes said she hopes to show her ceramics and sculptures along with others at an alternative venue. “We now understand that our administration does not actually care about what we have to say, so we’re more interested in taking our work to our community than keeping it in the institution,” she told Hyperallergic.
Hughes discovered the vinyl for Quiñonez’s exhibition missing from the gallery window when she showed up for her morning shift at CVAD last Thursday. “I was like, ‘Who did this? Why would they do this without telling us?’” she recalled. But when pressed for answers, faculty and staff replied that they’d been asked not to discuss the incident, Hughes said. “There was this idea of secrecy,” Hughes continued. “I was very aware of the fear in the department, of speaking too loudly.”
In an open letter to leadership, graduate art students characterized the axing of Quiñonez’s show as part of a “troubling pattern” at the Denton institution. A year ago, a display of pro-Palestine artworks at the student-run Union Art Gallery on campus was partly dismantled after complaints from Republican state representatives.
After that incident, a policy was put in place to protect artistic liberties, faculty members noted in their own open letter to UNT leadership last week. The policy, “Art Exhibited on Campus,” approved May 2025, safeguards faculty and students’ ability to “exercise the right of artistic expression in UNT facilities in a constitutionally protected manner.” “They wrote policy to protect freedom of speech, and now they broke their own policy,” Robyn Rozelle, another Studio Art graduating student and teaching fellow, told Hyperallergic.
Rozelle said she decided to withdraw her MFA show, which included fiber quilts and a site-specific installation she conceived especially for the CVAD space, in part out of support for the students who might see themselves in Quiñonez’s work. At UNT, a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, about a quarter of the student body identifies as Hispanic. “I grew up 45 minutes away from here, in Allen. The area has been very conservative my whole life,” Rozelle said. “I think for a lot of students, having some sort of representation of their culture in the school, and then seeing it censored like that, was heartbreaking.”
Undergraduate art history major Sierra Rose Dominguez, who organized the vigil action on campus last week, said students gave eulogies and left handwritten messages and flowers at the makeshift altar. “UNT, you have let your Latino students down,” read one message on an index card. “I’m a first-generation Mexican,” read another. “I’m heartbroken I didn’t have a chance to see this exhibit and now I never may.”
At the Latino Cultural Center in nearby Dallas, Quiñonez’s installation “Elevar la Cultura” (2021), a towering sculpture of water coolers stacked to resemble a Maya pyramid, remains on view through February 27