The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals

The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals is an exhibition of about fifty sculptures by the Peruvian artist Celia Vasquez Yui (born 1960), who works in the Indigenous ceramic traditions of her people, the Shipibo-Konibo, in the Amazonian city of Pucallpa. The coil-built process and mazelike patterns she uses are handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Jaguars, monkeys, armadillos, and tortoises, among other endangered species, are arranged in a kind of parliament of the animals asserting the rights of nature. Vasquez Yui is not only an artist and activist but also a healer, roles that are closely intertwined in her culture.

Vasquez Yui 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. Celia now works alongside her daughter, Diana Ruiz Vasquez, in an intergenerational collaboration that adds another expansive dimension to the work, where two bodies and two minds merge to finish each other’s designs.

The exhibition is accompanied by a recording of a special ayahuasca ceremony performed in the Peruvian Amazon by members of Asomashk, the Union of Shipibo Healers. Not intended to treat humans, the chants act as a sensory interface between humans and nonhumans, with birdcalls, chirps, roars, hisses, snorts, and squeaks focusing attention on nature as the patient. “I am traveling on land and underwater. I’m flying over the sky and the mountains, I’m searching the riverbed to identify your sickness,” sings one of the healers, joining bodies, spirits, lands, and waters in a worldview that is about conviviality, reciprocity, and kinship. These values underscore the interconnected nature of art making, environmental activism, and struggle toward Indigenous sovereignty—see the Shipibo Conibo Center’s reciprocity agreement for more about these relationships and practices.

Celia Vasquez Yui: The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals is a collaboration with the Shipibo Conibo Center in New York and was first shown at Salon 94 in New York in 2022. At the Johnson Museum, its presentation was organized by Andrea Inselmann, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Learn more at Johnson Museum Of Art.