CELIA VÁSQUEZ YUI

Early years and Background

Celia Vásquez Yui was born in the Amazonian city of Pucallpa and belongs to the Shipibo-Conibo people, one of the largest Indigenous nations in the Peruvian Amazon. She learned to work with clay alongside her mother, an eminent ceramicist descended from regional ‘polychrome horizon’ cultures, embedding her practice in ceramic traditions that span more than a thousand years.

Alongside her artistic career, Vásquez Yui has served as an Indigenous rights advocate and political representative for the Shipibo-Conibo, including leadership roles in regional cultural and professional organisations. She collaborates closely with the Shipibo-Conibo Center in New York, which supports her work and broader cultural preservation and education projects.

Celia Vásquez Yui Artworks

Celia Vásquez Yui’s artworks are hand-built ceramic vessels and zoomorphic sculptures that merge Shipibo-Conibo kené (quene) designs with a spiritual understanding of ecology, foregrounding the “mother spirits” of animals, plants, and environments. Her practice sits within contemporary art while remaining rooted in Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo knowledge systems, positioning Amazonian Indigenous art as a driver of global conversations around ecology, technology, and futurity.

Animal spirits and Shipibo cosmology

In bodies of work such as that presented in The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals, a collaboration with the Shipibo Conibo Center in New York and was first shown at Salon 94 in New York in 2022, Vásquez Yui presented an expansive installation of ceramic animal figures that evoke a bestiary of Amazonian beings and their mother spirits. The sculptures’ surfaces are covered in intricate kené patterns—geometric pathways that map Shipibo cosmology, music, and healing practices—transforming each work into a conduit between humans, animals, and the forest. A two-hour recording of an ayahuasca ceremony performed in the Amazon by a group of ancestral healers, in which the patient being administered to is nature herself, accompanied the presentation.

Individual works, including jaguar and tapir sculptures such as Otorongo and Black Sachavaca (Tapir), extend and exaggerate zoomorphic features to suggest both tenderness and power, making visible the presence and agency of nonhuman beings within Amazonian worlds. These artworks have entered major museum collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, underscoring their significance in contemporary art and Indigenous ceramic traditions.’

Indigenous Futurism and future artefacts

In the exhibition Indigenous Futurism (30 November 2025–10 January 2026) at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, Vásquez Yui extends her practice from animal spirits to speculative ‘future artefacts’. She reimagines technological objects—such as devices and tools—as clay relics that appear to have landed in the rainforest, bringing together Amazonian ceramics, science-fiction imaginaries, and Shipibo-Conibo design.

These works continue to employ kené mark-making as an encoded visual system, suggesting that Indigenous knowledge and aesthetics underpin future technologies and forms of communication. The installation creates an immersive environment of painted clay objects that invites viewers to consider the survival of Shipibo-Conibo culture and the Amazon as central to any shared planetary future.

Celia Vásquez Yui Exhibitions

Celia Vásquez Yui has been the subject of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important museums and galleries in Peru, Europe, and the United States. To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Celia Vásquez Yui follow her on Ocula; you can also view her exhibitions on Ocula.

• Indigenous Futurism, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, United States (2025–26)
• The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, United States (2023)
• The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals, Salon 94 (now LGDR), New York, United States (early 2020s)

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Ocula | 2025