Ph.D. Candidate Gabriela Germana Curates Exhibitions of Contemporary Peruvian Art

PhD candidate Gabriela Germana curated two exhibitions of Peruvian contemporary art in 2018.  Metal Bodies: Contemporary Peruvian Women Artists, is on display in the Embassy of Peru Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. from June 28 to September 16, 2018. Metal Bodies showcases the art of ten contemporary Peruvian women artists – Cristina Gálvez, Alina Canziani, Marta Cisneros, Johanna Hamann, Hilda Cachi, Verónica Cachi, Nani Cárdenas, Raura Oblitas, Carolina Rieckhof, and Nancy La Rosa – who have explored the female form through the medium of metal. The show aims to contextualize these artists within the contemporary Peruvian art scene and to show how their innovations have contributed to its development.

Gabriela’s second exhibition, Everything that Sounds in the Forest: Contemporary Art of the Peruvian Amazon, is on display at the Pensacola Museum of Art from August 17 to October 21, 2018. This exhibit presents a selection of contemporary embroideries, paintings, prints, and photographs that address the diversity of the Peruvian Amazon. The artists featured engage with traditional rural aspects of this region as well as its modern urban environments. The topics of their art include local nature, myths, people, customs, and knowledge, as well as gender and social issues.

Gabriela specializes in contemporary Andean art with emphasis on the relationship between traditional and indigenous aesthetics and the contemporary global art context. Her dissertation, under the direction of Dr. Michael Carrasco, examines the history of the paintings made by Sarhuino artists, both in the nineteenth-century peasant community of Sarhua and in Lima in the 1970s, and the manner in which they have constantly responded to and challenged modern Western aesthetics and knowledge.

Metal Bodies: Contemporary Peruvian Women Artists was organized by the Embassy of Peru in the USA, the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores Perú, and the Peru Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.