There is one memory David Guarnizo returns to often. He’s exploring the Cocora Valley in Colombia, surrounded by towering wax palms, when someone hands him the new 100,000 Colombian pesos bill, issued in 2016. He looks down and sees the very landscape surrounding him—printed, miniaturized, made official—staring back.
“That moment was transformative,” he says. “I realized I was experiencing the landscape both directly, through my body, and indirectly, through the image depicted on my country’s currency.”
It’s the kind of revelation that reorients a practice. For Guarnizo, who graduated from VCUarts in 2025 with an M.F.A. in Photography and Film, that afternoon in the Cocora Valley set in motion a decade-long inquiry into one of the most fundamental questions a contemporary artist can ask: What do we value and how do we decide?
From Bogotá to Richmond
Guarnizo grew up in Bogotá, a dense city of concrete. As a child, any trip to the mountains or countryside felt like something close to sacred. That early sense of wonder about the natural world became the foundation of his artistic practice.
After enrolling at the National University of Colombia, he began making work about landscape. He traveled to the northernmost landmass of South America at Punta Gallinas, chasing the horizon as a metaphor for the unreachable as well as for the intangible nature of the political lines, limits and boundaries of the territories where we live. From this perspective, David’s early works documented these personal encounters with the landscape through photography, video and performance.
Guarnizo has always understood himself as two things at once: an artist and an educator.
Throughout the years, he taught at universities, led education departments at two museums in his hometown and developed community-centered projects that used artworks as gathering points. This latter he calls a kind of fire around which people come together to ask questions and exchange stories. However, when the academic and institutional work began to crowd out his studio practice, he felt it physically.
“One of my professors at the National University of Colombia used to say that studying and making art is like going to the gym,” he says. “You have to exercise regularly. I realized I had stopped, and I could feel it. You have to rebuild your strength, train your memory, recover your physical dexterity. Over time, the creative practice becomes fluid and sharp again.”
The decision to pursue an M.F.A. was partly a decision to recover himself. Guarnizo focused on public universities, following advice from colleagues at museums and universities in Bogotá where he worked who said “public education systems carry a different energy and a different kind of openness, and that definitely influences an artist’s practice.”
He interviewed with several universities and was accepted into all of them. However, Guarnizo describes the way he came to VCU as “quite special.” When he spoke with associate professor Tesora Molina-Garcia in VCUarts’ Photography and Film department, a Latina professor from El Salvador who spoke with him not just about resources but also about the kind of practice he could build, his choice became clear.
“I felt it was essential to leave [Colombia], even if only temporarily, in order to see how my work would evolve in a different context,” explained Guarnizo. “What I wanted was not just access to equipment and facilities. I wanted to be part of an interdisciplinary and supportive community. And that is exactly what I found at VCU.
“It offered the perfect space to grow as an artist while also learning from my professors, classmates and students. At VCU, I have been able to cultivate a practice that is not only about making art, but also about sharing, exchanging and building knowledge collectively,” adds Guarnizo.
Currency as a Portrait of Power
Since arriving in Richmond in the summer of 2023, Guarnizo’s work has grown into something expansive and urgent. At its center are the objects we touch every day without really seeing: bills and coins.
For Guarnizo, a banknote is never simply money. It is an image, a political document, a compressed history of what a nation has chosen to celebrate. And what it has chosen to erase.
“When I have a bill in my hands I ask ‘What story is being told here and what story is being left out’?”
His M.F.A. thesis work exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond in the spring of 2025 explores these questions across a stunning range of materials and methods. Guarnizo engraves historical imagery onto stacks of newsprint, transforms archival photographs from the Library of Virginia, casts hand sculptures in plaster and bronze, and transfers landscapes from currency onto river stones collected from Belle Isle and the James River. In each case, the move is the same: taking an image that operates invisibly within economic systems and making it suddenly, viscerally visible.
One of the artist’s most resonant works began with a stone he carried from Colombia in his luggage. It was just an ordinary rock onto which he transferred the landscape printed on the 5,000 peso bill: the páramo, one of Colombia’s most ecologically critical and fragile ecosystems. While he was making the piece as part of his thesis work, news broke about a fire burning through a Colombian páramo. He altered the bill’s image digitally to include the flames, then transferred it onto the stone.
“It became a small but symbolic representation of how vulnerable these ecosystems are. How easily they can be destroyed if not protected.”
The stone sits in his studio—modest in size, enormous in weight.
The Hand that Holds
Another thread running through Guarnizo’s thesis is the image of the hand. If land and nature are shaped by the concept of property, he began to ask, which part of the body best expresses that? He started casting his own hand in plaster, wax and bronze, placing orbs or stones in its palm, even transferring fragments of banknote landscapes onto them. The gesture of holding, possessing, offering and protecting shifts meaning with the addition of each new material.
During a visit to the Warburg Institute in London in December 2024, just months before his thesis exhibition opened, Guarnizo was moving through the Eranos Collection of Jungian archetypes when he stopped cold. There, among hundreds of images, was a photograph of a Greek sculpture: the hand of Atlas holding a globe. He had already been making almost exactly that form in his studio.
“It felt uncanny, like a message from the universe saying, ‘You’re on the right track.’”
The serendipitous discovery deepened his understanding of a visual language that spans millennia—from Atlas bearing the weight of the world, to the orb held by monarchs as a symbol of dominion, to Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, where Christ holds a crystal sphere as a sign of cosmic authority. In Guarnizo’s hands, that lineage connects to the first bills issued during the American War of Independence, which he laser-engraved onto sheets of newsprint, carefully cutting out the tiny printed hands that appeared on them. Those fragile fragments appeared alongside his sculptural hands in his thesis show, a sort of conversation across centuries about labor, ownership and what we choose to hold sacred.
Learning in Community
Guarnizo speaks about his time at VCUarts with a gratitude that feels specific and earned, not generic. He credits a research seminar with associate professor Kate Sicchio for reshaping how he understood his own practice. It introduced him to the idea that working with a material or process that demands its own methodology is itself research.
He recalls seminars with associate professor Noah Simblist, where each student’s practice became the subject of collective inquiry, and studying alongside professors like Molina-Garcia and Sonali Gulati, whose international perspectives mirrored his own experience of navigating the United States art world as a Colombian artist.
Guarnizo speaks warmly about his students. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, he taught undergraduate photography courses and found that the exchange moved in both directions.
“My students became a window into understanding the U.S. art system and the perspectives that young artists hold here. Their insights were as important to me as anything I was able to share with them.”
A research grant from VCU made it possible to fund his thesis project, covering the cost of materials that were central to his work. The shift of his thesis exhibition to the Institute for Contemporary Art, where the curatorial and installation staff collaborated with students over months of studio visits and conceptual conversations, gave Guarnizo his first sustained experience of moving work from the studio into a major public institution.
“It’s not only about research and making. It’s also about broadening your experience in how to circulate your images, to present your work in professional spaces, and to understand what it means to engage with institutions,” he reflects.
Art Illuminates
Guarnizo keeps returning to Edward Hopper when he talks about what art can do.
“From my point of view, the role of a contemporary artist today is to detect and make visible problems, issues, phenomena or even emotions that were not so visible before.”
Hopper, he points out, captured the particular loneliness of mid-20th-century American life at a moment of economic growth and excitement. The iconic American realist painter did this not through argument, but through light falling across an empty diner at night.
“And that is how I see the role of the contemporary artist today. We begin from a phenomenon we notice in the world and then we let that question gather all our actions, techniques and materials around it,” says Guarnizo. “That is what I love about art: its ability to reveal. How can we create images to bring forward questions of diversity, migration, community, systems of value, landscape or the environment?”
That is the standard Guarnizo holds himself to. Not explanation, but illumination. Not answers, but the kind of image that makes a question feel urgent and alive.
In one of his newsprint works, a stack of cheap, disposable paper becomes a cash stack the moment a single dollar bill is laid on top. Photographs of Virginia farmers from 1939, women and men who built the wealth of a state on their labor, are laser-engraved into its sides. When the rubber band loosens and the pages shift, the portrait dissolves.
“[This work] speaks to the fragility of memory and labor. How easily these histories can vanish if they’re not held together,” he says quietly.
David Guarnizo’s work holds them together. In bills and stones, in plaster hands and translucent paper, he urges us to look at the images we carry in our pockets every day and to finally see what’s there and what’s not.
“We are surrounded by complex issues, and as professional contemporary artists, we are constantly called to respond. Sometimes those images hold the power to shift perspectives, even to change the world. I believe we artists carry the responsibility to propose new possibilities: to imagine utopias and new beginnings, to create perspectives we have never seen before.”
This article is based on interview notes between VCUarts photographer McNair Evans and the artist in spring 2025.
David Guarnizo (M.F.A. ’25) is a Colombian artist and educator whose work engages with landscape, currency and systems of value. Since graduating from VCUarts, Guarnizo has been awarded the VCUarts Teaching Fellowship to be a professor in the Photography and Film Department. He also received the 2025 Fine Arts Research Grant from the District Institute of the Arts in Bogotá, Colombia, which will support the publication of a book on mediation and contemporary education in museums. From January to March of 2026, he served as an artist-in-residence at 1708 Gallery in Richmond.
