The Armory Show

THE ARMORY SHOW 2025
September 5—7
Javits Center, New York

Booth F11
Focus Section

Crisis presents Santiago Yahuarcani (Pucaurquillo, Peru, 1960) and Nereyda López (Peruaté, Peru, 1965) for its first participation in The Armory Show. Married to each other and deeply rooted in their Amazonian cultures, both artists reclaim ancestral stories and denounce land appropriation and misuse. Their works resist colonial readings of history, placing Indigenous narratives—silenced for centuries—at the centre of their practice.

A self-taught artist and Indigenous leader of the Uitoto people, Santiago Yahuarcani comes from a lineage marked by displacement during the rubber industry’s violent exploitation of the Amazon. His paintings on barkcloth reflect on Amazonian ontologies, ancestral wisdom, and the history of genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples. By intertwining mythological worlds with testimonies of dispossession, Yahuarcani’s practice has become a powerful contribution to Peru’s national memory. He is currently presenting his first major solo exhibition at the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, which will travel to MASP (São Paulo) and Museo Universitario del Chopo (Mexico City), after participating in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). His work is part of leading collections including Tate, MoMA, Museo Reina Sofía, MASP, Van Abbemuseum, Kadist, and Museo de Arte de Lima.

Alongside him, Nereyda López creates sculptures from barkcloth, vegetal fibres, and wood, dyed with natural pigments. Her work draws from the myths of her Tikuna ancestors, a nomadic culture of the northern Amazon. Through these materials, she conjures the fantastic beings and spirits that populate Amazonian tales—guardians that watch over humans, shape-shift, and protect against fear. In her practice, ancestral memory, storytelling, and everyday domesticity converge, giving form to the living presence of territory and the spiritual force embedded in plants, rivers, and animals.

Together, Yahuarcani and López reclaim erased histories and the vitality of spiritual worlds that colonial modernity sought to eradicate. Their works gather memories, medicinal knowledge, and cosmological narratives to affirm the Amazon as a territory of consciousness, memory, and intelligence. By doing so, they remind us that climate catastrophe is not a recent crisis but part of a long history of dispossession—one that begins with the silencing of Indigenous voices and the erasure of the guardians of the land.