Mr Jesús Varillas, Museo de Arte de Lima
2007 award – pilot project
£10,000 for 6 months
Art history as an academic discipline has had scant development in Peru. It is taught only at the undergraduate level at one university (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos), and very few professionals are active in the field. The rich artistic and cultural heritage of Peru from the post-conquest period to the present has thus been largely neglected, and little effort has been placed on the recovery of archival documentation that could contribute in the future to research on this vast legacy.
Due to the lack of institutional supports for artistic practice, documentation is largely dispersed among private associations and individuals, and is hence difficult to identify or preserve. This project's basic purpose is to identify such archives and to formulate strategies for their recovery and for making them accessible to the scholarly community.
This project focuses primarily on regional traditions developed outside the capital, and it places emphasis on the Central and Southern Andean regions. Art generally forms part of communal life, and both production and patronage is defined largely by communal contexts and regional circuits. Boundaries between genres is also blurred, as art forms part of complex ceremonial and festive contexts. Further, in the case of the traditions under study, categories such as fine, popular or applied arts become more fluid and open. The complexity of the subject makes the retrieval of documentation a more difficult challenge.
Types of documentation:
1. Confraternity books and accounts. Much artistic regional production prior to the early 20 th century revolved around communal celebrations, usually of a religious nature, centered on the confraternity as the main axis. Confraternity books and accounts usually contain significant information regarding the organization of feasts, contracts with artisans and inventories of cult objects. Such materials are dispersed among a number of different institutions. Many are housed in the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, the Archivo General de la Nación, Beneficencia Pública de Lima, as well as in departmental archives, bishoprics and other ecclesiastical institutions. In many of these cases, neglect has even recently led to substantial loss of documentation. One of the aims of this project is to generate an inventory of such holdings in different archives that would allow us to determine an adequate form of copying for preventive conservation.
2. Regional artistic associations, intellectuals and photographers. The lack of institutional spaces for the development of art historical studies, as well as the general absence of institutional affiliations for most artists and creators, makes the retrieval of documentary materials a true challenge. The project will search for families of intellectuals and photographers who might hold written and visual records of importance, and will trace the whereabouts of archives relating to associations that operated in the 20 th century. The project will also search for archives holding regional publications and ephemera, which are very rare, as they were usually printed in extremely low runs.
3. Associations dedicated to regional traditions in Lima. During the 20th century, a number of individuals and institutions worked towards the promotion of regional arts and traditions. The project considers developing contacts with regional clubs in Lima , institutions, owners and administrators of the main galleries active in the period, as well as photographers and intellectuals who hold documentary materials.
Except for the archives of intellectuals and photographers, it is expected to find mostly fragmentary documentation in a number of diverse locations. This project should compile discrete gatherings of documents which, together, can constitute a highly significant source of information of interest to a broad range of disciplines, and especially to art historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians. By the end of the project it is hoped to have summary inventories of documentation and to have tracked down collections of documents that may form part of future retrieval projects. The project will also generate a map of types of institutions, individuals, and associations that have played an important role in regional artistic traditions.
