Athena Quispe

Athena Quispe is a multidisciplinary artist and romantic poet dedicated to the cosmic endeavor of softening and distorting symbolic ideas. She creates sculptural paintings and interactive installations that increase psychic and soul redemption. Quispe embeds her own poem spells within the cursive burns, plasma steel cuts, warped fractals and piping to convey intimate gestures of love, labor and melancholic honesty. Quispe pulverizes healing crystals, uses natural dyes and human fluids to problematize the Westernization of Indigenous art and tradition that has been repackaged as a New Age spiritual concept: a commodified experience that ruins the potential to help and heal. Her art and creative style is a transmutation of her Quechua heritage and that of the autochthonous ‘Americas’—a precolonial aesthetic, sacred tradition and invention often and wrongly accredited to twentieth-century European art. Quispe received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2020, and her MFA from Yale University in 2022.