Carrying Coca: 1,500 Years of Andean Chuspas

On view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery April 11--August 3, 2014
www.bgc.bard.ed...
Carrying Coca: 1,500 Years of Andean Chuspas considers how two components of Andean life-coca leaves and hand-woven textiles-are brought together in the small bag called a chuspa and examines this traditional object in changing cultural and economic contexts. Curated by Nicola Sharratt, this groundbreaking exhibition highlights the tension between tradition and innovation surrounding these socially important woven objects by presenting chuspas not as representations of a static, indigenous heritage but as the embodiment of social and economic change. In their actual and symbolic connection with coca, chuspas are unique among Andean textiles, essential to cultural practice, social relationships, ritual activity, and political negotiation. By investigating how these striking textiles are made, what they look like, who wears them, and when and how they are used, Sharratt reveals for the first time in an exhibition how the history of chuspas is a consequence not only of variations in Andean textile traditions but also of the story of the sacred and contested substance they carry.
Nicola Sharratt is the BGC--American Museum of Natural History postdoctoral fellow in museum anthropology and a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago. She directs an archaeological program in southern Peru, and her publications focus on the collapse of ancient South American states and empires, geochemical analyses of archaeological artifacts, and Andean craft production in the past and present.