Born in Peru, Kukuli Velarde is a Philadelphia-based artist who specializes in painting and ceramic sculptures with a focus on the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture. Following a presentation of her work, Velarde will be joined by art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw in this keynote for the Wolf Humanities Center's February 25 day-long symposium, Migration: Points of Entry, Points of Departure.
Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian artist based in the United States since 1987. She has received awards and grants such as the Guggenheim Fellowship (New York, 2015), the Pollock Krasner Foundation grant (New York, 2012), the United States Artists-Knight fellowship (California, 2009), the Pew fellowship in Visual Arts (Pennsylvania, 2003), the Anonymous is a Woman award (New York, 2000), the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant (New York, 1997), among others. In 2013 her project CORPUS got the Grand Prize at the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennial in South Korea.
Her exhibition credits include: CORPUS at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado, 2022), KUKULI VELARDE: THE COMPLICIT EYE at Taller (Philadelphia, 2018-19); KUKULI VELARDE at AMOCA, (Los Angeles, 2017); PLUNDER ME, BABY at the Yenggi Museum of Ceramics’ Biennial of Taipei (Taiwan, 2014); CORPUS (work in Progress) at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennial (South Korea, 2013); also KUKULI VELARDE: PLUNDER ME, BABY at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in (Kansas City, 2013), PATRIMONIO at Barry Friedman Gallery (New York, 2010) and PLUNDER ME, BABY at Garth Clark Gallery (New York, 2007).
She is married to sculptor Doug Herren, and they have a daughter named Vida. They live in Philadelphia, PA. USA.
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliated faculty in Latin American and Latino Studies, Cinema Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She has occupied the position of Senior Historian at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, serving as the Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs for the gallery. Dr. Shaw received her PhD from Stanford University and was an Assistant Professor at Harvard for five years before coming to the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. In the past decade she has helped mount exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, and Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She has also partnered with numerous institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Barnes Foundation, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, and the St. Louis Art Museum, to develop and implement numerous exhibitions, public programs, and other scholarly events.
