GALLERY CURRENTLY CLOSED DUE TO CONSTRUCTION
The Ancient Andean Gallery has been deinstalled in preparation for construction in the Kinkead Pavilion portion of the building. This will include HVAC upgrades and a complete renovation of this gallery. The reinstallation of the Andean Collection is part of a multi-year, interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars at KAM, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Scholars, and colleagues at UIC and the Field Museum. More information can be found at Andean Gallery Reinstallation.
Author: Allyson Purpura, Senior Curator and Curator of Global African Art
To view ancient Andean textiles in the collection, visit Andean Textiles Porfolio.
In 1967, Krannert Art Museum acquired a significant collection of ancient Andean art from Fred Olsen, an industrial chemist whose fascination with the nature of creativity and abstract design drew him to these highly expressive works of art. This extraordinary collection of over 600 objects represents a wide range of cultures and aesthetic styles that flourished throughout the coastal and highland regions of Peru from 1500 B.C.E. to the Spanish conquest of 1532, including Chavin, Paracas, Nazca, Moche, Wari, Huwara, Lambayeque, Chimu, Chancay, and Inka.
The artworks currently on view are grouped by the culture and period of their makers and feature an exquisite array of ceremonial vessels, textiles, metalwork, and jewelry associated with the burial sites and ritual centers of vast tributary states.
Whether painted on a surface, woven in cloth, or molded into their forms, the rich iconography of these works reveals how Andean artists visualized cosmological ideas relating to cycles of life and death and to the power that flowed between the social, natural, and spiritual worlds: mythological creatures merging animal with human imagery were associated with divine Moche, Wari and Inka rulers; stylized frogs symbolized the preciousness of water to Nasca inhabitants of the desert coast; and the proliferation of trophy head imagery spoke to the vital life force believed to be transferred to Paracas warriors from their slain enemies.
In fall 2016, KAM curators invited an interdisciplinary group of Andean studies scholars to the museum to review the collection and help lay the conceptual groundwork for a dynamic future installation. Together we envisioned an approach that will reveal the networks of communication and artistic exchange that informed the visual technologies, imagery, and ideologies of these diverse Andean societies.
In 2018, Krannert Art Museum received a major grant from Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and Humanities to support this reinstallation.
Senior Curator Allyson Purpura, Museum Director Jon Seydl, and Kasia Szremski, Associate Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, were awarded the grant to fund a two-year collaborative project with UIC’s Brian Bauer, and the Field Museum’s Ryan Williams to research, reimagine, and reinstall these holdings.
Informed by current, interdisciplinary research, the project will develop a new interpretative framework for the reinstallation, including storylines that will explore notions of identity and power, labor, systems of communication, and the politics of indigeneity. The project will also foster community outreach, bring two graduate students from the UIC Andean Archaeology program to KAM to work with the collection, and feature an interactive, digital platform that will connect local and global users to the collection, and to each other.
