Patrimonio: Kukuli Velarde
Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano with Barry Friedman Ltd., 2013
Forwards by Garth Clark and Carlos Runcie-Tanaka, essays by Colette Copeland and Janet Koplos
Paperbound, 142 pages. dimensions. Bilingual in Spanish and English (with brief introductions in Spanish only).
Patrimono documents Peruvian-born artist Kukuli Velarde’s mid-career retrospective which opened at ICPNA in Lima, Peru (May 10 – June 24, 2012) and is currently traveling in the United States. The biographic timeline in the book’s appendicies reveals that Velarde had her first solo show at ICPNA Gallery in Lima at the tender age of ten, so this is a full circle of sorts. The technical facility that made her a child prodigy is clear in the paintings, drawings, sculptures, (and video) that comprise the five bodies of work that are collected in Patrimonio: Cadavers, Corpus, Baroque Inferno, Sonqollay, and Plunder Me, Baby. But for Velarde, her talents are a means rather than an end: the “plundered” artifacts that she sculpts and the twisted icons that she paints reflect and reverberate with the struggles of indigenous populations as a result of European colonization.
Inspired by pre-Columbian terracotta figures, Velarde’s Plunder Me, Baby sculptures reveal folk tradition, evoke histories of ornament and craft, and disrupt normal aesthetic hierarchies. Removed from their natural environment and installed as if in an anthropological museum, these figurative characters appear as though awakened for the first time. Janet Koplos’ 2008 review of Plunder Me, Baby at Garth Clark, New York (Clark is the Chief Editor of CFile) is featured in the book. She described the show this way:
Best known as a figurative sculptor in clay, Velarde has previously dealt with themes drawn from her cultural legacy. Often she used a stylized infant or child figure. But something seems to have gotten her dander up, because here her female faces, busts, torsos or full figures are directly related to pot forms, and they grimace and flaunt their sexuality. The labels give each pot-woman a title and describe her personality and appetites, but while the tempers are strikingly different, they might all be the same woman… There is a 17-inch tall black stirrup pot with incised designs plus a face consisting of furiously bulging eyes and gritted teeth. The label says “India Pacharaca…Taciturn, abruptly violent, Enjoys rough handling…’(Art in America, Febuary 2008)
What “got into” Velarde was finding her subject and possibly maturation, the two things that any artist prays for. She has developed ways to represent the critical relationships between gender and race in the formation of identity, power relations, and visual representation in Latin America. Her paintings are just as pointed and powerful as her sculpture. Velarde is scarcely middle-aged and she’s been exhibiting for over 30 years. It will be fascinating to see what she comes up with for her next mid-career retrospective.
Kukuli Velarde was born in Cusco, Peru in 1962. She has a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Hunter College and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Velarde’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She has received numerous awards, including a PEW Fellowship for the Visual Arts, Evelyn Shapiro Foundation Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and Sculpture Award, Bronx Council of the Arts Fellowship, and recognition for Freedom of Expression by The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Merce Cunningham Foundation.
Amy Albracht is the General Editor at CFile.
Cover of Patrimonio: Kukuli Velarde from the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano with Barry Friedman Ltd.
Spreads from Patrimonio: Kukuli Velarde
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