Making “Folk” Modern: Violeta Parra’s Art

• In Event: The other Fridas: Women, art and feminism in 20th-century Latin America

Abstract

Violeta Parra (1917-1967) is an iconic figure in the Latin American cultural landscape. She was an embroiderer, performance artist, ethnomusicologist, curator, sculptor, painter and musician. For decades, Parra’s art has been overshadowed by her success as a musician; it’s exclusion from art history doubtless also due to her gender and her socially-engaged subject matter: Chilean folk culture.
Parra carried out field work in Chilean rural cultures with, among others, the Mapuche people and the mining communities. Her expertise would crystallize in a symbiotic relationship between her work as an ethnomusicologist and her work as a creator.
It will be explored the Latin American context for Parra’s art, considering the relationship between her art and the popular cultures she studied. It will be also explored the link between Parra’s earlier work curating a museum of popular culture and her later personal practice creating modern art for major international galleries. One of Parra’s earliest exhibitions was in the Feria de Artes Plásticas in Santiago, an event that explored the boundary between artesanía and art, a theme she continued to develop in her work. Reflecting on the trajectory of Parra’s career from her exhibitions in the Chilean Ferias de Artes Plásticas to her exhibition in the Helsinki Kulttuuritalo and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs of the Louvre gallery in Paris, Parra’s praxis was part of a wider movement to recuperate Latin American folk culture and this movement itself was strengthened by discourses on colonialism and decolonization, key concerns in the 1960s.

Author

• Lorna Dillon, King's College London