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In 1994, UNM Professor of Art and renowned land artist Bill Gilbert travelled down Ecuador’s Bobanaza River (a tributary of the Pastaza River in the Ecuadorian Amazon) to the village of Sarayacu, home to a Canelos Quichua community. Gilbert was interested in the expertise and detailed knowledge of the land held by Quichua artisans, and, perhaps, in bringing UNM students there to study with expert women potters. He soon decided that the arduous journey and living conditions in the rainforest would not make this possible and instead began work in northern Mexico among the potters of Mata Ortiz. He did, however, acquire an important collection of Quichua ceramics, and in 2016 donated some 52 elaborately decorated vessels and associated documentation to the Maxwell Museum.
Quichua women produce hand-formed jars and bowls using local raw materials for daily use and ritual activities and, more recently, for art and tourist markets. The elaborate painted designs on the thin-walled, coil-built drinking bowls (mucawa) used to consume the fermented beverage aswa, manifest the symbolic, cosmological, ecological knowledge and personal experiences of their makers. The most respected potters are known as sinchi muscuj warmi, “women of strong vision”.
For more information:
Amazonian Ceramics From Ecuador: Continuity and Change
Dorothea Scott Whitten, 2003, “Connections: Creative Expression of Canelos Quichua Women” In, Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. by Eli Barta. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Post by Carla M. Sinopoli