Bio
Donald Guevara (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist and professor based in Nashville, TN. He currently teaches at Austin Peay State University as a professor of art. Guevara received his BFA in Illustration from Columbia College Chicago (2013) and his MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University (2022), where he was awarded the Excellence in the Visual Arts Award and the Jim Boone Endowed Scholarship.

A 2022–23 TOY Fellow at NXTHVN, Guevara’s work is deeply informed by his identity and upbringing. He is of Indigenous Honduran and American German descent and was raised in St. Louis, MO within a first-generation Congolese American family. This layered cultural background introduced him early to themes of contradiction, transition, and relations—ideas that remain central to his practice.

His current work explores liminal spaces and the fragmented nature of identity, combining digital, 2D, and 3D collage. Using materials such as basketballs, shoes, magazine advertisements, and trading cards, Guevara incises and reassembles these objects into glitched bodies and visual vignettes that challenge conventional narratives of race, gender, and cultural belonging.

Statement
Through layered collages of drawings, paintings, blown up magazine advertisements, and found objects spanning across decades I create vignettes and portals into the space of the AFK (away from keyboard) Glitch. This is done by diving into the experience or state of mind that is attached to being within the “in-between” and liminal realms, inherently found in collage. Limbs, some of the most difficult parts of the body to code through the lens of gender and often even race, twist, wrap and overlap each other, and in this dance, is the display of contradictory bodies and settings superimposed and cut together to become a new whole; the cyborg of cultural mixture in a new virtualized arena where the procession of time can be known but not yet felt. This approach is also applied to binary coded items such as pointe shoes and football helmets to bring about a provocative new object that tip-toes along a liminal space of defiance in the face of ever growing pressures to be something other than one’s true self. The work demands for a poetic of relations that radically links ideas of gender with race in a tornado of trials. Tick tock goes the clock because the time for change is present.