Kukuli Velarde
In Search of a Connection: Which Aesthetics Belong to Me?

Kukuli Velarde
"In Search of a Connection: Which Aesthetics Belong to Me?"

Peruvian artist Kukuli Velarde joins Kislak Center Curator Carol Damian to focus on three bodies of work by the artist—Corpus, Plunder Me Baby, and Isichapuitu—and to explore how her work engages the complexities of identity and cultural appropriation in the face of enduring colonization, feminist reimagination, and the challenges of envisioning universal social justice.

Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian artist based in the United States since 1987. She has received awards and grants that include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2012), the United States Artists-Knight Fellowship (2009), the Pew Fellowship in Visual Arts (2003), the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2000), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997). In 2013 her project Corpus received the Grand Prize at the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale in Icheon, South Korea. Exhibitions of her work include Kukuli Velarde: The Complicit Eye at Taller Puertorriqueño (Philadelphia, 2018–19); Kukuli Velarde: Plunder Me, Baby at American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, 2017); Plunder Me, Baby at the Yingge Ceramics Museum as part of the Taiwan Ceramics Biennale (New Taipei City, Taiwan, 2014); Corpus at the Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale (Incheon, South Korea, 2013), which won the Grand Prize; Kukuli Velarde: Plunder Me, Baby at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, Kansas, 2013); Patrimonio at Barry Friedman Gallery (New York, 2010); and Plunder Me, Baby at Garth Clark Gallery (New York, 2007). She lives in Philadelphia.

Dr. Carol Damian is an art historian, former Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Art History at Florida International University, and former Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU. She has contributed to numerous publications and lectures frequently on Latin American and Caribbean art, and the local art scene. She is currently Curator of the Kislak Center, part of the Miami Dade College Special Collections, housed at the Freedom Tower; and of the Chapel of La Merced Colonial Collection at Corpus Christi in Miami.