Art History in the Amazon

For decades NASA has collected satellite images of the Amazon River basin that document changes in its waterways and rainforests. Using this data, researchers have confirmed what the 1.5 million Indigenous people living in the Amazon region already understand: Native land stewardship is better for the planet when it comes to global warming.

That lesson extends beyond the environment, and scholars are increasingly approaching the study of culture through an Indigenous-centered lens. If you could have superzoomed into NASA’s satellite feed from March 2024, you might have been able to catch a glimpse of this new kind of art history in practice when scholars canoed to remote villages to learn from these communities directly.

The group traveled for hours by bus, jeep, and boat to reach the remote village of Sarayaku, Ecuador, home to a Kichwa Indigenous community of the same name. There, the scholars met with local artisans and leaders to learn about their community and practices, ranging from traditional pottery techniques to political activism.

The trip was just one leg of The Amazon Basin as Connecting Borderland, a multinational traveling research seminar supported by Getty’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. The seminar was designed for scholars from the region to encourage a more collaborative, inclusive approach to studying Amazonian art, one that elevates Indigenous perspectives that have long been marginalized in traditional art historical narratives.

Since 2009, Connecting Art Histories has closed the gap between the classroom and the field through in-person and online workshops, graduate courses with visiting professors that expand regular curricula, and immersive traveling research seminars like those along the Amazon River. Participants from around the world build knowledge, respond to local contexts, and rethink how art history is practiced through firsthand experiences with communities, collections, sites, and peers from different research backgrounds.

“‘What is art history?’ is an important question today, particularly as the field seeks to demonstrate its relevance by engaging directly with social realities, local knowledge, and the conditions under which visual culture is produced and understood,” says Miguel de Baca, a senior program officer at the Getty Foundation, who leads the initiative. “We’ve already seen these powerful experiences reshape research trajectories and foster long-term scholarly and institutional partnerships—and there’s more to come.”

When art historians leave their comfort zone

The project unfolded across Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil, examining the Amazon River as both a shared border and a means of transportation that also leads to cultural exchange. Visits to museums, sites, and local communities gave participants a more holistic understanding of how the region’s culture and artistic production have been shaped by this geography.

“We wanted participants to experience the places they’re studying, establish connections with local communities, take those learnings, and change their approach and their own research,” says Maria Berbara, a professor of art history at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, who co-organized the project with art history professors Carmen Fernández-Salvador (Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador) and Patricia Zalamea (Universidad de los Andes in Colombia). “We need to work collaboratively and across time periods, because what we’re questioning is precisely those boundaries between nature and culture. Most of us are trained within particular fields, whether it’s history, anthropology, or ecology, but none of these disciplines alone is sufficient to address the challenges posed by the study of the Amazon.”

This type of trip is far from typical in the field of art history. For many, art history courses take place in a classroom, where students learn about art movements that occurred within clearly defined geographic regions and timelines. But it’s not often that they have the chance to experience firsthand the places and cultures that shaped those artistic traditions or study their influence beyond regional or national borders.

“The Amazon is often seen as a place of contested boundaries between modern nations, but we thought of it in terms of what connects us, which is really the river itself,” Fernández-Salvador says. “The idea was to bring together people who shared this common border and leave our comfort zone as art historians. We may be working with archives and images, but we also have a responsibility to work with colleagues in other disciplines and collaborate with Indigenous communities.”

The cohort included archaeologists, anthropologists, curators, art historians, and social and environmental scientists whose research spans centuries, from pre-Columbian ceramics to contemporary Indigenous curatorial practices. Fernández-Salvador, Berbara, and Zalamea developed the program to move beyond typical art historical frameworks in the region, which often focus on Spanish and Portuguese colonial influences, and instead highlight Indigenous knowledge and connections between different Amazonian communities.

Participants visited urban hubs like Belém, a major port city in the Brazilian state of Pará, and rural villages deep in the Amazon rainforest to understand a variety of cultures along the river. They also built new connections among fellow Latin American scholars who feel a shared responsibility to steward the forest and the communities who call it home. As Berbara says: “Centers and peripheries exist everywhere. We just need to rethink and reestablish connections that go beyond urban centers.”

Listening and learning from local artisans

In Ecuador, Kichwa and Shuar artisans introduced researchers to the materials and techniques used in the production of ceramics, resins, and dyes. Beyond the hands-on workshops, community members generously shared insights into local traditions and practices—direct conversations that are out of the ordinary for many art historians.

During their time with the Sarayaku, who are adamant stewards of the environment against oil extraction, the group learned about cosmology, artisanal practices, political activism, and how to ethically conduct interviews with Indigenous populations. These exchanges underscore the importance of actively listening to and incorporating Indigenous perspectives and practices, especially as the region’s natural resources face increasing threats. As participant Alejandro Garay Celeita says, “Traveling along the river, seeing and touching objects up close, listening to the oral histories and teachings of the communities and different people who safeguard and share knowledge that is constantly recounted, allowed me to rethink the way I think and write on both personal and academic levels.”

Artisans from the Murui community in Leticia, Colombia, also led workshops on natural dyes. The group harvested plants from a local garden like chambira palm leaves and huitillo, a fruit that produces a deep purple or blue hue. They also learned how to crush, heat, and add different ingredients to the plants to produce vibrant shades used to dye palm leaves for weaving.

“Learning to work with pigments was the ultimate experience as an art historian,” Fernández-Salvador recalls. “We are so interested in theory and talking about images from a distance, but it’s very rare for us to engage with materials. The experience even encouraged me to rethink the way we teach art history.”

Co-creation, not appropriation

Museum practices that include local Indigenous communities were also a key area of focus throughout the trip. In Colombia, a visit to the Museu Etnográfico Magütá de Mocagua put a model of community-led curation into perspective for the group. The museum houses archaeological and ethnographic pieces from the Magütá (also known as Tikuna) community in a way that is meaningful to them. There are no glass display cases. Instead, masks are arranged in the middle of a room, while baskets, oars, and other objects line the walls on wooden racks.

“Everything is about the fluidity of the objects in the world, not about freezing them in time,” Berbara explains. “It’s a really different approach that challenges what we understand a museum to be.”

The group also visited the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, a research institute and museum in Belém, Brazil, with a significant collection of Indigenous ceramics and other material culture from the Amazon, that has integrated Indigenous curators into their exhibition practices. Influenced by these experiences, several of the seminar participants are keeping this idea of collaborative curatorship in mind for future projects. For example, participant Diana Iturralde, a PhD candidate in art history at Rutgers University who specializes in Latin American modern and contemporary art, worked with the Puyo community of Ecuador to bring ceramics to New York for an exhibition she guest curated at the Americas Society.

Fernández-Salvador and her academic colleagues at Universidad San Francisco de Quito invited women from Puyo and Sarayaku to join them on campus to co-organize a recent exhibition at the National Museum of Ecuador. The guests decided what objects were shown in the exhibition and how they were presented.

“The idea is to work alongside Indigenous peoples instead of appropriating what they know,” Fernández-Salvador says. “We must recognize Indigenous communities as our coauthors and not just rethink, but question, what we’ve been doing in the past. The people whose cultures are being studied should have the agency to shape how those stories are told.”