A mi Muerto (head severed) from the Isichapuitu series

“My work is a visual investigation of aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance,” Velarde shares. “I focus on Latin American history, particularly that of Peru, because it is the reality with which I am familiar. I do so convinced that its complexity has universal characteristics, and any conclusion can be understood beyond the frame of its uniqueness.” 

Velarde’s Isichapuitu series is grounded in an oral tradition from her native Cusco, Peru: “Once upon a time there was this priest wildly in love with a woman who died. In his despair he procured a ‘vessel of death’ for summoning her spirit, and loved her one more time.” Velarde’s installation, likewise, is “an exorcism, but also a farewell, and a new beginning.” It features “several versions of the same figure, based on a 2,000-year-old Mexican statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—an obese male child with his arms up that somehow looks like me. Each figure responds to a different need, because each of us, we are all sums of viscera and flesh, expectations and disappointments, memories and oblivion . . . . They go next to each other, because they were not created to be observed and qualified as objects.”

Velarde’s work is in museum collections including Woodmere, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work was included in Woodmere’s 2018 Annual Juried Exhibition and the 2021 exhibition New Grit: Art & Philly Now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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