The knots suggest a form of braiding weighed down by its materials, while the shape beckons individuals to come closer. Rendered in neutral tones of taupe, beige, copper, and brown, the sculpture is equally inviting and warm as it is alien in its textures and composition.
The artist draws craft-based practices from the region around her hometown, honoring the land politics and immigration issues that were so central to her youth.Īguiñiga’s recent sculpture Matriarchal Womb (2022) features interlocking knots of hair and wool that form a womblike protuberance. Altogether, they form exquisite abstractions that resemble grids overlaid with organic plant or fungal life.Īguiñiga’s practice was informed by her own childhood experience of crossing the border to attend K-12 schools in the United States growing up, her family lived a few blocks from the border wall in Tijuana, Mexico. The artist/activist invites members of marginalized groups-women of Mesoamerican heritage in particular-to weave with her “off-loom.” In 2016, she founded the AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) collaborative, for femme artists to make art documenting their relationship with the border.Īguiñiga’s own work features distinctive interlocking knots of rope, hair, wool, terracotta clay, and other materials. Tanya Aguiñiga’s impressive rope and textile-based installations view craft as a form of easily accessible, embodied knowledge. Using oral histories and research as starting points, artists use shards of the past to reconfigure their cultures for future generations.Īrtsy spoke with five contemporary Latinx artists working in abstraction- Sarah Zapata, Ronny Quevedo, Lisa Alvarado, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Blanka Amezkua-to understand how they use abstraction to keep precolonial indigeneity across the Americas and Caribbean alive. A special interest in precolonial architecture pervaded the show, and the focus on “Latinx” artists (a descriptor that eliminates markers of gender) also embraced the complex nature of identity for those who feel fragmented by a colonial past.Ĭontemporary Latinx abstraction doesn’t just look towards repairing the past, though: It also helps envision Indigenous futures. The exhibition suggested that European colonial culture did not destroy Indigenous culture at all-that precolonial forms live on as vibrantly as ever, through the work of contemporary Latinx artists such as William Cordova, Livia Corona Benjamin, Jorge González, Guadalupe Maravilla, Claudia Peña Salinas, Clarissa Tossin, and Ronny Quevedo. In 2018, Marcela Guerrero curated “Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show featured paintings and sculptures that were outstanding in their own right-and reinvigorated the American canon of abstraction that has, for too long, been dominated by white Euro-American male artists. Last year, Elizabeth Ferrer curated the revelatory exhibition “Latinx Abstract” at BRIC with the contemporary Latinx artists Candida Alvarez, Karlos Cárcamo, Maria Chávez, Alejandro Guzmán, Glendalys Medina, Freddy Rodríguez, Fanny Sanín, Mary Valverde, Vargas-Suarez Universal, and Sarah Zapata. These painters, sculptors, photographers, and weavers are slowly reviving Indigenous forms of knowledge as they connect to their roots. The open-ended nature of abstraction appeals to many of them. Nair writes about how contemporary Latinx artists are reclaiming their aesthetic past by embracing fragmentation and the partial histories they’ve received. Across the Americas and the Caribbean, the pattern persisted: Europeans destroyed artifacts of native creativity as they asserted their dominance over the people themselves. In her article “Witnessing the In-visibility of Inca Architecture in Colonial Peru” (2007), Stella Nair describes how 16th-century Spanish colonists razed Incan art and architecture, replacing Indigenous culture with their own.
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