Along the Ucayali River

Sara Flores was a child when she learned the ancient art of kené—the sacred visual language of the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, in which geometric patterns are seen as manifestations of the connections between humans, plants, and spirits. The form is traditionally passed down from mothers to daughters, though not by rote instruction. Flores absorbed the method in Tambo Mayo, a village along the Ucayali River in northeastern Peru where she was born in 1950. The village has since been abandoned, but she still lives and works in the region today, using an ink pen that she fashioned from a broken umbrella rod and pigments extracted from plants that grow along the Ucayali.Over a dozen paintings in the kené manner make up a new exhibition of her work, “Akinananti,” which translates from the Shipibo-Conibo language roughly as “interconnectedness.” According to Flores, kené art was not originally intended to be sold. It was made for young Shipibo-Conibo women’s coming-of-age ceremonies, in which bodies, clothes, textiles, and ceramics are all covered with painted patterns. Her own method is to paint directly onto wild-cotton canvases, without any preliminary drawings. She ...