ARTIST TALK: Rember Yahuarcani
@ Wrightwood 659
659 W Wrightwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60614
Opening Thursday, June 25th, from 6 PM - 7 PM
Nuestros mitos, nuestras memorias con Rember Yahuarcani
Thursday June 25, 2026
Exhibition Viewing: 4:30 PM
Talk Begins: 6 PM
This program is in Spanish with live English translation
Join us for a talk with Uitoto artist Rember Yahuarcani, a painter and activist whose work preserves and reimagines the myths and spiritual traditions of his culture. Through vivid, dreamlike imagery, his work captures Indigenous knowledge and memory–interlacing human, spirits, flora and fauna. Following the lecture, Yahuarcani will discuss his recent painting commission for Dispossessions in the Americas with exhibition co-curator Eduardo Carrera.
Yahuarcani is one of 36 artists featured in Dispossessions in the Americas. His work was recently presented at the 60th Venice Biennale, and he is widely recognized as one of the leading contemporary artists to emerge from the Amazonian region.
Artist Bio:
Rember Yahuarcani is a painter, writer, curator, and activist who belongs to the Aimeni clan (the White Heron clan) of the Uitoto Nation of northern Amazonia in Peru. Yahuarcani’s paintings draw on the narratives of Uitoto mythology and Western art traditions and techniques. Since 2003, his artistic vocabulary has moved from a descriptive style found in his early paintings to the creation of large-scale lyrical, oneiric landscapes like the one included in Dispossessions in the Americas. Through delicate traces and bright colors, Yahuarcani presents scenes inviting us to immerse ourselves in Uitoto thinking, storytelling, and daily life in order to see and feel the world from a different belief system. The animals, plants, spirits, humans, and other beings of the Amazon rainforest, which populate his paintings are depicted as molecularly connected to each other; the artist reclaims them as sources of wisdom. Yahuarcani paints his multiple characters perpetually in motion as if they were escaping from the identities and narratives imposed by the state and the Western world.
Official Website
More events on this date
Tags: Chicago, Lincoln Park, Rember Yahuarcani, Wrightwood 659
« previous event