The brilliant visionary yarn paintings of the shaman-artist Jose Benitez Sanchez emerge transformed into two-dimensional form from fleeting, sublime visionary experiences triggered by the complex chemistry of the divine peyote cactus. Benitez's visions are of the Huichol universe in Mexico's rugged Sierra Madre Occidental, as that world came into being in the First Times of creation and transformation and in the ongoing magic of a natural environment that is alive and without firm boundaries between the here and now and the ancestral past.
Modern yarn paintings-more than 30 in the University of Pennsylvania Museum's collection are illustrated here-have their roots in the sacred art of communication with numberless male and female ancestors and native deities, related in the two remarkable Huichol origin myths also presented here to shed some light on Native American culture and provide some understanding of the religious experience that informs it.
- ISBN10 1931707979
- ISBN13 9781931707978
- Publish Date 12 January 2007 (first published 20 October 2003)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press
- Imprint University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 120
- Language English