UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The art, culture, science and history of Andean peoples have come together in three interconnected experiences involving Penn State faculty, students and museums, as well as scholars and artists from around the country and the world. “Collecting the Andes” (a three-day symposium) and “Exhibiting Incas” (an interdisciplinary course) will culminate in “Collecting the Andes: Andean Art, Science, and the Sacred at Penn State” in the new Palmer Museum of Art’s teaching gallery in fall 2024.
The project originated with Assistant Professor of History Christopher Heaney, who learned about the work of Peruvian artist Fernando ‘Coco’ Bedoya while conducting research on the history of Andean museum collections in Peru and the United States. Bedoya’s process for creating artwork combines trepanation, an ancient cranial surgical procedure practiced by the Incas, with replicas of pre-Hispanic ceramics made for tourists. Heaney also was inspired by Kukuli Velarde, a Peruvian-American artist whose paintings and ceramic sculptures focus on the themes of gender, colonization and the collection of Andean culture and history.
“Both Bedoya’s and Kukuli’s work critique how Andean culture has been commodified and how art can make visible that past,” Heaney said.
Heaney’s research led to a conversation with Amara Solari, professor of art history and anthropology, whose research focuses primarily on the Maya.
“Both [Bedoya’s and Velarde’s] sculptures, paintings, ceramics and prints intervene upon the intellectual questions of what it is to collect an ancient culture and appropriate the knowledge systems of that ancient culture into a university system,” Solari said. Add the fact that Penn State has significant Andean collections in the Palmer Museum of Art, the Matson Museum of Anthropology, and the Eberly Family Special Collections Library — which includes manuscripts, archives and rare books — and the conversation changed.
“Amara and I realized this can’t be a normal show with objects on display that speak for themselves,” Heaney said.