Three-part project probes, celebrates art, culture and history of Andean peoples

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.

Encouraged by Michael Kulikowski, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Classics and head of the Department of History, and Erin Coe, director of the Palmer Museum of Art, to “think bigger,” Heaney and Solari expanded their original idea to include an intellectual and scholarly component, a student-focused component, and a University/community component.

The intellectual component was “Collecting the Andes,” a three-day symposium held in November 2022. The gathering brought scholars and practitioners of art history, history, anthropology, archaeology and museum design from Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and the United States together to discuss the collections of Inca and Andean aesthetics, sciences and natures in the Americas and Atlantic world from the 1530s to the present. Kukuli Velarde provided one of the symposium’s keynote presentations. While attending the symposium, she and Veronika Tupayachi, a museum curator from Cuzco, Peru, met with students and enjoyed a dinner hosted by Penn State’s Peruvian Student Association.

The student-focused component of the project was a new course, co-taught in fall 2022 by Heaney and Solari. Titled “Exhibiting Incas,” the course gave students — split evenly between art history and history majors — the chance to curate the third component of Heaney’s and Solari’s project: an Andean exhibit in the teaching gallery of the new Palmer Museum of Art — slated for fall 2024.

“Our class is a model of what teaching can look like at Penn State,” Solari said. “It provided a vehicle to talk about topics that likely would not come up in a different kind of classroom, such as the repatriation of native remains — things that are sensitive.”

In addition to making decisions about the future exhibit at the Palmer, students created online “mini exhibits” based on their individual interests, such as the prevalence of llamas in Andean art or the representation of Inca rulers. Members of the Peruvian Student Association are contributing to the exhibit as well.

“For the first time in its history, the Palmer Museum of Art will have a teaching gallery in the new museum building,” said Erin Coe, director of the Palmer Museum of Art and associate clinical professor in the College of Arts and Architecture. “We are excited to develop one of the first exhibitions in this new space with Amara and Chris. The exhibition supports a key goal of the new museum to include a dedicated space to support and present faculty-generated research and scholarship with strong pedagogical impact for students and visitors.” 

“Collecting the Andes: Andean Art, Science, and the Sacred at Penn State” will include Penn State’s holdings as well as works by Bedoya and Velarde. Heaney and Solari said the exhibit will highlight the presence of the collections at the University as well as the ethical questions that surround why they are here. Additionally, it will focus on highlighting ancient knowledges, ancient objects and ancient scientific practices (like trepanation) and how these forms of collecting have influenced art as well as “how living people’s art and knowledge can get turned into things that get bought and sold and laid up in collections around the world.”

“For me, the fact that ‘Collecting the Andes’ will be on view when the new Palmer Museum of Art opens to the public is especially exciting,” said Elizabeth Mansfield, professor of art history and head of the Department of Art History. “Amara and Chris’ collaboration will set the tone for future exhibitions organized by Penn State faculty members through its scholarly rigor, co-curricular programming and — most important — its sensitive presentation of historic as well as contemporary works of Andean art. I expect ‘Collecting the Andes’ will be the inspiration for faculty-directed exhibitions for years to come.”

The project is being funded through grants from the Humanities Institute and the departments of History and Art History. “Beyond the financial support, we have received so much intellectual support from the museums around campus,” Solari said. “Everybody has been so excited and amenable. I love to be able to reach out across colleges and across disciplines because this is art and science.”

“It’s very wonderful to have our institution really get behind this project and create a runway in which we have the time and space not only to build this exhibit but to do the talking and the experimenting —and even failing — that is part of any project and also creates a chance for students to get involved,” Heaney said.

“What really excited me about this project was the opportunity to bring in actual working artists to see the historical aspect of this through the eyes of contemporary art,” Kulikowski added. “These Peruvian artists are actually working with some of the collected cultures, so you can draw an interesting dialog about cultural appropriation, cultural continuity and the role of historical imperialism. Big picture, it shows a much wider world the sort of caliber of forward-thinking research and public-facing research we can do here at Penn State.”