We Left a Register of Each Individual’s Participation

This text is part of Alternative Routes, a project that foregrounds the work of eight young Afro-Latin American and Indigenous artists and highlights the historicity of racial and ethnic relations within Latin America’s art worlds. This project was organized and edited by Bruno Pinheiro, Ph.D. candidate in History at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), and Horacio Ramos, Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

This text is an edited transcription of an interview conducted in Spanish with Venuca Evanán Vivanco.

Este texto está disponível em português.

My art is from the community of Sarhua. The pioneering proponents of this art in Lima were the Sarhuino migrants Primitivo Evanán Poma, my father, and Víctor Yucra Felices, my uncle. ^[2] In 1976, they founded the studio Q’ori Taqe [The Golden Warehouse] in Las Delicias de Villa, in the Chorrillos district of Lima. For the production of the tablas, my father and my uncle would talk about a topic, and propose ideas. Then they would bring in more people. That’s when [in 1976] a young person named Juan Walberto Quispe Michue became involved. He was a carpenter and devoted himself to setting up the canvases. Little by little, he went about finding his own place in the studio and took on the task of doing the sketches on wax paper (fig. 1). ^[3] He hadn’t studied drawing and he would do the distribution of figures empirically. But he did know how to sketch and that is something that sometimes I no longer see in Sarhuino artists; nor in my own work. For me, he was the greatest ever at drawing. Sadly, he passed away from a heart attack [in 2007]. If he hadn’t, I think his works would have been highly relevant today. In addition to drawings, Juan Walberto also created his own tablas, applying acrylic to plywood using a bird’s feather (fig. 2).

The Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua [Association of Sarhua Popular Artists]—ADAPS, in Lima—was founded in 1982. ^[4] The Association’s projects were a collective undertaking. There was a person assigned to the design, another to painting, another to finishing and also another person in charge of the carpentry. It was there in the Association—with my parents, my uncles and aunts, my cousins—that I took my first steps toward apprenticeship. The studios were on a thousand-meter plot of land, closed off, that had the architectural form typical of the Andes, cement with a red tile roof. My father, my mother and I would go into a tiled room and we would sit down and paint. I painted with my father and with my mother; the three of us would paint together in a little room. It was a very nice moment that we got to spend together. What child doesn’t want to spend time with their parents, working together? Juan Walberto would be in the other room working on the drawings. In front of that room was the carpenter’s shop where he would produce the wooden supports for the tablas. In the largest room, the rest of my family members, my uncles and aunts, would paint the figures and add the finishing touches. It was nice to see how they worked together. We would also have lunch in the main room. There was also a big space with nothing built there; that was where we kids would play while our parents were working on painting. We were like one big family, and that was where, among our cousins, in the time between our games, we learned how to paint.

It was my dad who negotiated the commissions and the production of the tablas; he was the face of the operation, the one who would do the public interviews. But to be fair, I think that other Sarhuinos (like Juan Walberto) should be given the same prominence. My mom, Valeriana Vivanco, for example, knew how to make tablas, she was a real perfectionist. She was also the one who taught me to use a bird’s feather to paint, which for me was the hardest part of that process. When she would go to the fair, she would explain the story behind the images, and she knew how to sell them. I saw how the work that she did, her efforts, were lost. For that reason, when my mother passed away in 2008, I started to think about how often women are made invisible. And not necessarily because they don’t want to [be visible], but because the historians who write the registers haven’t taken them into account. And that made me also started to wonder: The history that we read in books, is it really true? And that was when I started to ask about the lives of the women in my family, and to register their experiences through painting. ^[5]

So I said to myself, “There’s a reason I was born a woman.” I decided to help more women to trust themselves, to have faith in themselves and to know that they have value. Especially women from the Andes, who at times can be very subdued. I would look at my aunt Gaudencia Yupari Quispe, for example; I would see how she made her skirts and I would say, “Tía, what an eye you have, what patience. What you’re doing, to me it’s art. Why don’t they consider it art, why don’t they value this in the same way?” Then I said to her, “I want to incorporate textiles in my tablas too, because I consider that a form of art.”

So I asked the Sarhuino weavers Alejandra Mejía Quijano and Richard Pomasonco to sew some patterns like the ones on the blouses worn by the women of Sarhua, so I could use them as the divisions within my works. Those were the first tablas of Sarhua to include textiles; that hadn’t been done before. In thematic terms, in that series I was highlighting women who I consider to be great artists. I painted Gaudencia making skirts and blouses. And I painted Violeta Quispe Yupari doing what she likes to do: painting Andean humanized animals (fig. 3).

In addition to doing paintings of women and talking about the value of women, I like to put it into practice. For example, I’ve been working for some time with Jaqueline Loa, an artist of Amazonian origin. She learned to paint tablas with me. One day I asked her, “Why don’t you paint flowers from the Amazon region, or your own experiences as an heir to Amazonian art?” She started to paint and I said, “Make sure you sign it too. Sign it because little by little your name will get out.” I said this to her because a long time ago, when I was working with my dad, he would do the drawing and I would paint. And sometimes I would think, “But why don’t I also get to sign my name, when I was also involved?” That was when I decided that I also wanted to sign my own work, and that it was important for other women to sign their work too. ^[6]

Then I paid attention to what the Shipibo-Konibo community did in Lima; in particular, the way Shipibo-Konibo women displayed their textile art on walls in public spaces. I met Olinda Silvano and I discovered her manner, and how her personality motivated her community. ^[7] I loved that and I said, “If these women can do it, so can I.” Because sometimes art is only seen by those who take interest. But if art were out in the street, those who are interested and those who aren’t would get to see different sorts of artistic expressions. So, I said to myself, it would be nice to take the art of Sarhua to the streets of Lima, so that more people can get to know it. After doing a mural for an exhibition, I collaborated [in 2021] with the Venezuelan artist Vanessa Avendaño on the production of the mural Integración cultural peruana venezolana [Peruvian-Venezuelan Cultural Integration]. ^[8] The project consisted of an intervention on the rear wall of the Ministerio de Cultura [Ministry of Culture] in the San Borja district of Lima (fig. 4). I planned out the wall as if it were a tabla of Sarhua, but gigantic. The technique and the form of the drawing is inspired by the tablas: the spaces are flat and without much perspective.

Vanessa Avendaño was the one in charge of coordinating focus groups with people from the San Borja district in Lima. We did some virtual interviews with them, and they would tell us about their experiences; what it was like for them migrating from one place to another, whether it was within Peru, or from Venezuela to Peru. I made a register of that in order to make a sketch. Then I presented the sketch to them and asked them if they felt it reflected what they had told us, and if they did, we would present it to the institution. Once that was approved, we put it up on the wall. Vanessa and I prepared the wall, and from that point we worked with other collaborators on the drawing. It wasn’t easy to do, but I had the help of my muralist friends, those who attended art school and those who were self-taught. But all of us worked on everything. We all contributed, we all provided support.

When I was doing this project, a friend said to me, “Aren’t you afraid your sketch won’t come out like you want it to, with so many other people involved?” But thinking of it from the perspective of collaborative work, it’s not like you have to make a tabla of Sarhua that’s “perfect”; at least not from my point of view. The important thing is the content. And it’s more important to me that the content be made up of the traces of the people involved in this project. With the migration mural, we all did the drawing and we all painted. There’s a little bit of everyone in that painting. Not just Venuca, not just Venessa, but everyone. And we all signed it, too. We left a register of each individual’s participation. And that’s what’s nice about it. For me it’s important not just to preserve Sarhua art, but also the collaborative way of making art in Sarhua. Or at least that’s what I try to preserve.  

Juan Walberto Quispe Michue (Sarhua, Ayacucho, 1955—Lima, 2007) was a Sarhuino artista and founding member of the Association of Sarhua Popular Artists (ADAPS) in Lima. As a member of ADAPS, he made designs and frames for the tablas of Sarhua, and took part in numerous national and international exhibitions. Parallel to his work with ADAPS, he performed as a guitarist and harpist with the musical group Q’ori Taqe. He also did work in applied art design. In 2015, he illustrated the first Quechua version of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel Cervantes Saavedra, translated by Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui.

^[1] This text is an edited transcription of an interview that took place on May 20, 2021 with Venuca Evanán Vivanco, who has corrected and approved this text. The footnotes are written by the editor, Horacio Ramos.

^[2] Primitivo Evanán and Víctor Yucra first exhibited their paintings in Lima in 1975, in Galería Huamanqaqa. For a historical study of the artistic format known as the “tablas de Sarhua” (whose earliest examples can be dated to the 19th century), see Gabriela Germaná, “Doing It Their Own Way. Tablas de Sarhua: Indigenous Aesthetics in the context of Contemporary Peruvian Art,” doctoral thesis (Florida State University, 2021). Another important study of Sarhua art, emphasizing its relationship to the broader context of the Peruvian internal armed conflict, is Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes by Olga González (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

^[3] The sketches were done on wax paper in order to make them easily reproducible. The handmade sketches produced for the Taller Q’ori Taque and later for the Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua(1982 to present) are the products of collective creation and are currently preserved by the Association. This text includes a work of Quispe’s individual creation.

^[4] In 1982, Primitivo Evanán Poma, Juan Walberto Quispe Michue, Bernardino Ramos and Valeriana Vivanco founded the Asociación de Aristas Populares de Sarhua en Lima. For more on how the Tablas of Sarhua were reconfigured by Sarhuino migrants in Lima from the 1970s forward, see Gabriela Germaná, '"Hemos hecho estas tablas para hacer conocer a Sarhua': reelaboraciones visuales y resignificaciones identitarias en las tablas de Sarhua en Lima (Perú)",” in Ana Cielo Quiñones Aguilar, Mundos de creación de los pueblos indígenas de América Latina (Bogotá: Pontifical Xavieran University, 2020): 243–272. To learn more about the Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua, visit www.artistaspopularesdesarhua.org; as well as the online stores www.tablasdesarhua.com; and https://artistaspopularesdesarhua.ruraqmaki.pe/.

^[5] Over the course of 2019, Venuca Evanán produced the series El emprendimiento de la mujer sarhuina en la ciudad de Lima a través del arte y la cultura, which depicts the artistic and cultural practices of several Sarhuina women in Lima. For more information on this series, see Galería Ginsberg (https://ginsberggaleria.com/) or write to the artist directly (venucaevanan@gmail.com).

^[6] In 2020, Venuca Evanán and Jaqueline Loa co-produced the paintings Este Congreso no me representa and Comunicación en tiempos de COVID-19.

^[7] The name Shipibo-Konibo is a term used to refer to the three neighboring peoples in the Ucayali River basin in the Peruvian Amazon region. Since 2016, Olinda Silvano and Silvia Ricopa (two Shipibo-Konibo artists living in Lima) have been producing murals in the public spaces of the capital city, which has helped bring visibility to their community. See CAAP, “Shipibos decoraron pared de San Isidro con mural artístsico,” 15 December 2016, https://www.caaap.org.pe/2016/12/15/shipibos-decoraron-pared-de-san-isid....

^[8] In 2018, Venuca Evanán produced a collaborative mural with muralists Xomatok and Jibé at the Euroidiomas Foundation. The mural Integración cultural peruana-venezolana [Peruvian-Venezuelan Cultural Integration] was finished in March of 2021, in coordination with the Día Internacional de la Eliminación de La Discriminación Étnico-Racial [International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination]. This mural was financed by the United Nations Development Programme with support from the Ministerio de Cultura del Perú. In March of 2021, there were more than one million Venezuelan migrants in Peru. For more on the murals, see PNUD, “Un mural para la integración,” March 2021, https://www.pe.undp.org/content/peru/es/home/presscenter/articles/2021/u....