Spencer Museum of Art curator aims to stimulate growing interest in Amazon

LAWRENCE — The Amazon is hot — literally and figuratively — and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas has just acquired a large collection of contemporary works from the Peruvian Amazon that a curator will include in a future exhibition about the region.

Meanwhile, the collection is already being put to use to engage students in a variety of courses.

Under the leadership of Ryan Clasby, curator for global Indigenous art and lifeways, the Spencer Museum has acquired nearly 100 Shipibo-Conibo works of art from the personal collection of Joan Lathrap, former collaborator and wife of pioneering Amazonian archaeologist and anthropologist Donald Lathrap. Donald Lathrap died in 1990. Joan Lathrap died in 2023. Through personal and professional connections with Clasby, her estate bequeathed the works to the Spencer Museum.

The objects were collected in the 1950s and 1960s, Clasby said, during the time the Lathraps spent living among the Shipibo-Conibo in the village of San Francisco de Yarinacocha in the Peruvian Amazon.

“There are about 23 ceramic vessels, 23 textiles, 15 items made out of beads — necklaces, bracelets, earrings ... eight objects associated with ritual or ceremonial use, and a few more quotidian objects like spoons, oars and arrows,” he said.

Those are the Shipibo-Conibo items. Clasby said there are a few others made by other Amazonian and Andean artisans.

Clasby also explained how the items were collected and how their undisputed provenance supports research, learning and relationship building with Shipibo-Conibo community members.

“While Don Lathrap was doing archaeology, he was also living amongst the Shipibo-Conibo, learning about their customs, and he took a lot of interest — both him and his spouse — in what is referred to as ethno-archaeology,” Clasby said. This practice, he said, “is looking at contemporary cultural patterns and taking that information to infer something about the past. And so he (Donald Lathrap) is particularly interested in Shipibo-Conibo ceramic production. And who is making it? Exclusively the women in the community.”

The Lathraps took extensive photographs of Shipibo-Conibo craft production techniques alongside numerous photos of community life during their time in the village. While Clasby said the original negatives will be accepted into the American Museum of Natural History, which can better preserve them, he is in discussion with community leaders to create a physical catalog that will help preserve San Francisco de Yarinacocha’s rich cultural heritage and make it more accessible to the community. Indeed, Clasby has traveled to San Francisco de Yarinacocha on multiple occasions over the last three years, meeting with descendants of the community members whom the Lathraps worked with, and sharing digital copies of the images.

Clasby is already working toward a major exhibition that would feature the Lathrap collection in dialogue with contemporary Amazonian art, with the goal of not only showing innovations in media, form, style and theme across Amazonia, but also in the way in which art speaks to and reflects on life in the Amazon today and the issues that affect its people.

Already, students in Latin American studies, anthropology, Spanish and Portuguese courses, among others, are learning with the collection.

“There is a deep history of KU scholars working in the Amazon rainforest as it relates to both the ecological and humanistic sides,” Clasby said.

The curator’s exhibition ideas “are still very early in the development,” he said, “but one of the things we're playing with as a concept is deconstructing the Western imagination of the Amazon, which is very much ecologically based and rooted in ideas of a return to nature ... a place that's exotic and dangerous, full of jaguars; that's kind of beyond the bounds of human society, but which also holds the key to humanity’s future. Nowadays, increased ecotourism and psychedelic tourism risk reinforcing such oversimplifications of the Amazon and its peoples.”

Instead, Clasby, through collaboration with contemporary Amazonian artists and communities, wants to overturn this exoticism by making audiences aware of the region’s rich and deep cultural history — a place that has been occupied for thousands of years and which today is home to millions of people and diverse populations, their stories being told in their own voices through unique and innovative forms of art.

“I think there's a lot of interest by the Spencer, as well as the university, to emphasize that global aspect and really take that title of global Indigenous art seriously, and try to expand that, because that's my specialty,” Clasby said. “They've been very good about letting me pursue this proposed exhibition and build the collection in a way I think will be beneficial to the university. Together, we’re putting KU on the path to become one of the foremost U.S. institutions for Amazonian scholarship.

“I think the Amazon is really becoming a hot topic in the present, both from an ecological and cultural perspective, especially as it relates to the art and archaeology of the region, but, unfortunately, from a resource-extractive, pseudoarchaeological and psychedelic thrill-seeker perspective, as well. ... It's slowly becoming more and more part of the public consciousness. This is why I see it as an area that can be expanded.”