Amazonia Açu Conference

Art at Americas Society, in partnership with The Amazon Basin as Connecting Borderland, is pleased to present the Amazonia Açu Conference on Tuesday, February 24, from 5 to 8 pm. This two-panel public program examines diverse artistic and literary perspectives from across the Amazonian territory.

Hosted in person at Americas Society, the first panel will introduce the core objectives and selected research initiatives of the Getty-funded project Connecting the Amazon Border. Project Directors Maria Berbara, Patricia Zalamea, and Carmen Fernández-Salvador, together with Amazonia Açu co-curator and project contributor Diana Iturralde, will explore key dimensions of Amazonian visual culture across a broad historical span, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The discussion will address topics such as cartographic imaginaries, processes of musealization, and colonial artistic production.

The second panel centers on contemporary poetic and literary voices from the Amazon region. Focusing on the Amazon basin anthology (volume 3) of Ruge el bosque, a project about environmental and plurilingual poetics organized as a series of regional anthologies. This panel conversation will feature its Project Director and Editor Valeria Meiller in dialogue with Joseph M. Pierce, associate professor and founding director of Native American and Indigenous Studies initiative at Stony Brook University. The panel will also include poetry readings by poets María Clara Sharupi Jua and Elías Caurey Caurey, presented via video in Shuar and Guaraní, respectively.

Tuesday, February 24, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM ET 
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065
REGISTER HERE

This event is free and open to the public.
Early arrival is suggested as space is limited, and entry is not guaranteed for late arrivals.

Both panels will be recorded and uploaded to our website. A reception will close the event.

This conference is organized in conjunction with the exhibition, Amazonia Açu, curated by Keyna Eleison, Grace Aneiza Ali, Christian Bendayán, Elvira Espejo Ayca, Diana Iturralde, Miguel Keerveld, NouN and T2i, Mateus Nunes, Luis Romero, and María Wills.

The exhibition will be on view from September 3, 2025 to April 18, 2026 at Americas Society.

Panel One Speakers:

Maria Berbara (PhD, University of Hamburg) is a professor of art history at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She specializes in Italian and Iberian art produced between the 15th and 17th centuries, as well as in cultural history, early modern globalism, and intellectual interchange in the Atlantic world. Her current research examines the history of the Antarctic France, the global image of the Tupinamba, and the relation between art, diseases, and conversion processes across the early modern Atlantic. Her individual and joint academic projects have been supported by the Getty Foundation, Villa I Tatti, DAAD/Germany, INHA/Paris, and the Brazilian funding agencies Fapesp, Faperj, CNPq, and Capes. Together with Roberto Conduru and Vera Siqueira she coordinated the project “Unfolding Art History in Latin America,” which was funded by the Connecting Art Histories initiative in 2012, in which both the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and the Universidad de los Andes also participated

Carmen Fernández-Salvador (PhD University of Chicago) is professor of art history at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She has published various studies on colonial art and historiography, among them “Reflections on Painting in Colonial Quito”, in The Art of Painting in Colonial Quito (Philadelphia: St. Joseph University Press, 2012); “Following in the Footsteps of Christ: Uses of the Via Crucis in Colonial Quito”, in Aesthetic Theology in the Franciscan Tradition: The Senses and the Experience of God in Art (Routledge, 2019) She coauthored the book Arte colonial Quiteño: Renovado enfoque y nuevos actores. Biblioteca Básica de Quito 14 (Quito: FONSAL, 2007); with Verónica Salles-Reese, she edited the volume Autores y Actores del Mundo Colonial: Nuevos Enfoques Multidisciplinarios (Quito: USFQ, Georgetown University and CASO: 2008). During the fall semester of 2015, she was the Robert F. Kennedy visiting professor at Harvard University. In connection to the topic of this project she has published “Jesuit Missionary Work in the Imperial Frontier: Mapping the Amazon in Seventeenth-Century Quito,” Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (Philadelphia: Penn University Press, 2014) and Encuentros y desencuentros con la frontera imperial: la iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús de Quito y la misión en el Amazonas (siglo diecisiete) (Vervuert, 2018).

Diana Iturralde is the 2024–26 Cisneros Institute research fellow at MoMA and a Ph.D.candidate in art history at Rutgers University. She specializes in modern and contemporary art from Latin America, and her dissertation work examines visual representations of cultural and environmental transformations in the Andean-Amazon region from the nineteenth century to the present. She contributed to the exhibition Amazonia Açu as a co-curator. Diana is affiliated with the Andean-Amazonian Studies Working Group and the Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice Working Group at Rutgers University. She has participated in the Center for Curatorial Leadership seminar and the Getty Foundation’s The Amazon Basin as Connecting Borderland seminar from 2023 to the present.

Patricia Zalamea (PhD Rutgers University) is associate professor of art history at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was the dean of the School of Arts and Humanities between 2015 and 2021. In addition to developing the first art history undergraduate program in Colombia (2010), she is one of the founders and board members of the Colombian Chapter (CCHA) of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) and part of the steering committee of the Transregional Academy on Latin American Art of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (2019-2022). Her fields of study include Colonial Latin American art, Global Renaissance art, the reception of Classics in a Colonial context, history of the print, and portraiture. Recent publications include a diachronic study of the portrayal of an Andean chieftain, titled “Narratives of Sacrifice in the Nuevo Reino de Granada: Doubting Sugamuxi and Muisca Conversion in a Colonial Context” in Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Harvard U. Press, 2022); two chapters and one article on the Classical tradition as reinterpreted by humanist circles in 17th-century Lima and Cuzco, one of which appeared in Re-inventing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1300-1700 (Brill, 2020). She has also explored classicizing features in secular mural paintings of 16th-century Tunja, Colombia (Historia y Sociedad n.36, 2019).

Panel Two Speakers:

Elías Caurey Caurey (b. 1977, Charagua, Bolivia) is a prominent Guaraní intellectual. A sociologist, anthropologist, and poet, he uses words as a bridge between culture and nature. In 2019, he represented the Indigenous Peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean at UNESCO. He is the author of over twenty publications on Guaraní language, culture, and spirituality. His most renowned works are: Yayandu Ñeere (Feeling the word) (2018), a bilingual poetry collection that was awarded the Eduardo Abaroa Plurinational Prize; Ñeepoti Kaa Peguarä (Song to the forest) (2020); and the Diccionario etimológico y etnográfico de la lengua Guaraní hablada en Bolivia (An etymological and ethnographic dictionary of the Guaraní language spoken in Bolivia) (1993), part of the Bicentennial Library of Bolivia. His work is also notable for helping to revitalize the Guaraní language, which he defends through poetry. By using the original language in his artistic creations, Caurey Caurey reaches a wide range of Guaraní communities in Bolivia and Paraguay.

Valeria Meiller is assistant professor at the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a core faculty member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. Her research lies at the intersection of Indigenous studies and the environmental humanities with an emphasis in plurilingual poetry and the visual arts. She is currently working towards two book projects: Necroterritories. Slaughterhouses and the Politics of Death and In Defense of the Land and Biodiversity and Linguistic Diversity in 21st Century Poetry of Abiayala. Valeria is also co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Unpredictable Architectures. The Aesthetics and Politics of Gardening in Latin America (Brill, 2026) and the forthcoming special issue Still Lives. The Inhuman in Latin American Culture (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2026). Her work has appeared in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), Hispanica Moderna, and other venues.

Joseph M. Pierce is associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of two books, Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025). He co-edited Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable,” and has published work in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, as well as in popular outlets such as Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds, and in 2024-2025 he was a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

María Clara Sharupi Jua is an Ecuadorian writer, poet, translator, cultural manager, Shuar leader, and communicator of Shuar indigenous origin, recognized for her work writing poetry in Spanish and in her native language, Shuar. Originally from the Amazon region, her poetry seeks to reflect the essence of the jungle and give voice to community and ancestral narratives. She is co-author of the work Amanece en nuestras vidas (Dawn in Our Lives) and the collection of poems Tarimiat, composed of texts in Shuar, Spanish, and English. She holds the position of director of the Tarimiat Shuar Amazonian Culture Organization, an entity dedicated to the promotion and defense of the rights of Shuar families. María Clara Sharupi Jua studied at the Salesian Polytechnic University of Ecuador, where she graduated in Management for Sustainable Local Development. She was part of a team of translators of the Ecuadorian Constitution who translated it from Spanish into Shuar. She has visited Helsinki to give a lecture on transculturality. In addition, she has had the honor of being invited to teach at a university in Germany. She has also visited FLACSO, University of the Arts, specifically in the areas of literature and intercultural anthropology. She has traveled and brought her work to Canada, Ethiopia, the United States, and Finland, demonstrating her extensive international experience.