Celia Vásquez Yui

Celia Vásquez Yui is an artist, Indigenous rights activist, and political representative of the Shipibo-Conibo People of Peru. Born in the Amazonian city of Pucallpa in 1960, she began creating alongside her mother, an eminent ceramicist and descendant of the polychrome horizon cultures, whose archeological record throughout the Amazon dates back thousands of years. Balancing a cultural imperative for inventiveness with the constraints of traditional style, Celia Vásquez Yui has distinguished her practice through astonishing creative innovations, exploring and expanding the zoomorphic features of the style, and beyond. Not only does Celia Vásquez Yui work alongside her daughter, Diana Ruiz Vásquez—an intergenerational collaboration that adds another expansive dimension to the work through which two bodies and two minds merge to finish each other’s designs—but she also has the custom to cut off a lock of hair from the head of her youngest apprentice in order to make from scratch the paintbrushes of different sizes she uses to paint the designs. This way, her kené pathways channel into a pledge for the future too.