Olga De Amaral

Describing her first trip to Peru in 1968, Colombian artist Olga de Amaral recalls how she was “overwhelmed by the ancestral intelligence—the high mathematics—present in everything textile in ancient Andean culture.” In her Cesta Lunar series, de Amaral manipulates woven openwork tapes into a seductive golden surface that pays tribute to the skill, power, and wealth imbued in the textile heritage of South America. Her other references include the spiritual resonance of gold artifacts, the advanced architecture of pre-Hispanic Andean buildings, the ornamentation of colonial Catholic churches, and contemporary basketry by the indigenous Yanomami in Venezuela.