Natalia Majluf:
Textiles/Art. An Essay on Aesthetic Categories in Twentieth-Century Peru

This lecture departs from the fact of the absence of nineteenth and twentieth century textiles from modern Peruvian collections, questioning specifically the ambivalent place of Aymara and Quechua weavings in the national imaginary. At once hyper visible and absent, an ever-present surface in the cultural sphere and a marginalized aesthetic practice, textiles allow a critical point of entry into crucial issues of the Peruvian twentieth century, forcing into view the aporias of dominant discourses of art, race, culture and nation.

Natalia Majluf is an independent curator and art historian, Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in Autumn 2021. Majluf was a Head Curator and later Director of the Museo de Arte de Lima (1995–2018), where she oversaw the renovation of the historic building that houses the museum and contributed to expand the range and scope of the collections. As an art historian, she has curated exhibitions, lectured and published broadly on nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin American art. She has held the Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, as well as fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington D.C. and at the University of Cambridge. She is currently co-editor of Latin American Research Commons, Latin American Studies Association, and the digital platform Trama, espacio de crítica y debate [Trama, a space for criticism and debate]. Her book Inventing Indigenism: Francisco Laso’s Image of Modern Peru, is forthcoming.

The KHI Amerindian Lecture Series 2021 is conceived as a forum to reflect on Indigenous arts/visual cultures and aesthetic practices created on the American continent, past and present. It is organized by Sanja Savkić Šebek (KHI in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) & Bat-ami Artzi (Dumbarton Oaks) within the framework of the Department Gerhard Wolf & the 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics.