A carpet of corn kernels is spread out on the floor of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. In it is the word “ixi’n” written out in dried chili peppers. It means “corn” in the Indigenous Mam language spoken in Guatemala. Behind it, there is an altar that honors the typical rural kitchen of Latin America.
A Hartford-based group created the art installation, which embodies fond memories of ancestral cooking, as part of an initiative that brings healing to migrant communities.
“Ancestors Today: Visual Stories of Migrant Women” is a collaborative art project that combines the various artistic skills of Arte Popular, an artisan collective of Latin American migrant women from Hartford. The piece is featured in an exhibition called Entre Mundos: Art of Abiayala; '"‘Abiayala" is an Indigenous term for the American continents and "Entre Mundos" means "between worlds.".
The installation features the work of fifteen female artisans from the group, including knitted vegetables, embroidered quilts, and paintings, according to Arte Popular Coordinator María Adela Pineda.
The women come from all over Latin America, Pineda said, including Argentina, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia and Puerto Rico. When asked to take part in the project, Pineda said the women realized that a common theme in the memories of their homelands was the kitchen.
There was a longing among the women for the food of their native countries and the space where that food was cooked, said Camilo Ruiz, an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut who took part in the collaboration.
“How the kitchens in Latin America are very well connected to their immediate landscapes. So, how, for example, people can cook a plantain that is growing a meter away from the house or how a kitchen has a window where you wash your dishes and through that window, while you’re washing dishes, you are able to see what is happening in town,” Ruiz said.
The many months of workshops with Arte Popular for the project brought up happy memories of that lifestyle, he said, along with lost memories of their Indigenous roots.
“It was so beautiful how, through the process, many of the women who did not recognize themselves as having Indigenous ancestry, they started to remember that, in fact, their grandparents were really coming from the countryside and spoke Indigenous languages and they started to bring back memories, even some of the languages,” said César Abadía-Barrero, a UConn associate professor of Anthropology and Human Rights.
Healing and reclamation through art
Efforts that bring about this kind of recollection in community is the goal of the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative at UConn, of which Abadía-Barrero is the director.
The initiative aims to help communities heal from colonial wounds, a term that Abadía-Barrero said refers to the wounds that were inflicted during the colonial invasions of the Americas. Through community-based efforts, the intention is to reclaim all that has been lost and bring it all back to life, he said.
“For a lot of women of the collective, they have never been at a museum and they were absolutely thrilled and excited to see their art, to see themselves on display, to see themselves as artists and to be acknowledged by the museum,” Abadía-Barrero said.
“I think that’s going back to the colonial healing idea. I think this brought back not only a sense of identity, but a sense of pride in who they are and what they represent and what they can bring to society, even more so in times that we’re entering that are going to be very threatening and dark,” he said.
Under the direction of visiting UConn professor and artist/curator Francisco Huichaqueo, the installation was complemented with artwork and artifacts from the Wadsworth collection, representing Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.
Huichaqueo has a strong interest in connecting the creation of art with culture, particularly Indigenous Latin American cultures. He identifies as Mapuche, the largest indigenous population in Chile. When working on this project, he said he incorporated the pieces of Abiayala to highlight the ancestral connections to these lands.
Speaking to Hartford with their ‘hands, labor and art’
Arte Popular’s contribution to the exhibition invites local residents to see the people who are living in their city and contributing to their community, Huichaqueo said.
“[The project], in a way, illuminated the city of Hartford, because we put a spotlight on a group that was invisible,” Huichaqueo said in Spanish.
For the women of Arte Popular, the beauty in the project was in remembering their childhoods and their homelands, according to Pineda, the group’s coordinator.
“The project was very beautiful because it made us remember details that our day-to-day lives made us forget, or memories that were always there, but just hadn’t resurfaced yet,” she said in Spanish.
It also sends a message, she said, that immigrants can be recognized for their work and be respected as both artists and hard-working members of society.
Though they may struggle to speak the language, she said, they can and have always communicated with their hands through their labor and their art.
Learn more
The Entre Mundos exhibition is on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum through Sunday, Dec. 15.
