Artist: Santiago Yahuarcani

Stephen Friedman Gallery, in collaboration with CRISIS Gallery (Lima), co-presents Flight of the White Heron Clan, the first New York solo exhibition of Santiago Yahuarcani. An advocate for the rights of his clan—the Áimeni of the Uitoto Nation—and a leading figure in contemporary Indigenous art, Yahuarcani paints on llanchama, a bark cloth that he harvests and prepares by hand.

Opening in the wake of his highly acclaimed participation in the 2024 Venice Biennale, and as his work receives timely monographic surveys across Europe and Latin America, this exhibition brings New York audiences outstanding compositions that carry his clan’s history and worldviews.

Born in 1960 into a lineage of artists and healers, Yahuarcani inherits stories transmitted by his mother and grandfather, Martha and Gregorio López. These include the enslavement and genocide inflicted by rubber barons on the Uitoto and other nations in the Colombian Amazon (1879–1914), and his family’s subsequent migrations, amid regional wars, before resettling in Peru in the 1940s. Since the 1980s, he has painted on llanchama, turning the bark cloth into a counter-archive for memory and repair.