Kaysaypac: Portraits and Figures by Leeanna Chipana

Kaysaypac: Portraits and Figures by Leeanna Chipana

Jul 5–Oct 6, 2024

Kaysaypac: Portraits and Figures continues Leeanna Chipana’s exploration and construction of narratives surrounding Peruvian identity. In Chipana’s ongoing series of portraits, she imagines a contemporary Incan world that was not disturbed and remolded by colonialism. Chipana formally utilizes European portrait painting techniques and conceptually draws from surrealist or sci-fi narrative world-building to imagining a present that came out of a different past–an alternate reality.

Rendering her subjects in indigenous dress, Chipana creates a narrative where Europeans were visitors to the Americas, not conquerors or colonizers. The figures and patterns detailed in her paintings are influenced by those found on Incan vessels. There is a dreaminess and distance present in the artwork, in the softness of her brushwork, and in the expressions of the subjects and the far-off landscapes. Chipana has imagined a safe future for her ancestors.

Through Chipana’s narratives, a space opens to discuss the impacts of colonialism. Through her work, we can imagine different futures where, perhaps idealistically, colonialism might not exist as the primary, dominate reality, but as a ripple in a more expansive history of a people. The subtle idealism latent in the work is moving. The unrealistic pursuits of the idealist are also visionary. In its most successful activation, idealism can draw from history and reality to learn from mistakes, using it to hone what is worth holding on to and envision a future in which we want to live.

– Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray
Curator and Exhibitions Director

About the Artist
Leeanna Chipana was born on Long Island, NY to an immigrant Quechuan-Peruvian father and American mother. She studied classical drawing at the Grand Central Atelier and received her MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2017. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Long Island Museum, the Heckscher Museum, Southampton Arts Center, Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery of SUNY Old Westbury, and the Wilkinson Gallery. Woman with Alpaca, a painting included in the group exhibition, “Parallels & Peripheries: Practice & Presence” at the New York Academy of Art was featured in the New York Times. Chipana was also included in American Art Collector Magazine’s “10 Painters to Watch” and was named by Miradas Magazine as one of eighteen Peruvian-Americans of note living and working in the US. 

Drawing from her Quechuan and American identity, local Indigenous-Latinx communities and media portrayals of Central and South American immigrants, Leeanna creates figurative oil paintings of emboldened and timeless indigenous women in both dreamed and potentially real environments. Employing Incan, Aztec, and Mayan iconography, as well as her background in classical European oil painting, Leeanna’s work challenges the conventions of traditional figure and landscape painting. Subtly blurring the lines between classical and modern forms of representation her work examines societal assumptions and views of the Indigenous-Latinx body.