Indigo Arts Gallery | Huichol Indian Art 1

Our Huichol Indian Art Gallery features a collection of visionary artworks from the Huichol Indians of Mexico’s remote Sierra Madre Occidental region. It centers on the nierika yarn paintings by the celebrated shaman/artist, José Benitez Sanchez, as well as other Huichol artists.
Benitez was the subject of Mythic Visions: Yarn Paintings of a Huichol Shaman, the dazzling 2003 exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The paintings reflect the visions of Huichol shamans - Huichol history and mythology and especially the peyote-inspired visions through which they believe they can communicate with the deities to heal themselves and their world. At Indigo Arts we have featured the work of José Benitez Sanchez and other Huichol artists for many years. In October and November 2005, Indigo Arts showcases this work with the exhibition Visions to Heal the World (October 7th to November 27th, 2005).
Thanks to their isolation in the mountains and canyons of the state of Nayarit, the Huichol, alone among the indigenous peoples of Mexico, were able to largely resist conversion to Christianity by the Spanish conquistadors. They have maintained their pre-conquest religion and traditions nearly intact. The Huichol practice a nature-based religion guided by shamans, which the anthropologist Peter Furst calles “a powerful everyday spirituality that seemed to owe nothing to the religion of the conquistadores.” The religion and the sacred arts which serve it are directed toward communication with a pantheon of “numberless male and female ancestor and nature deities” and in so doing finding the causes and cures of illness. 19th century ethnographer Carl Lumholtz called the Huichol a “nation of doctors”, for an extraordinary number of Huichols (an estimated third of adult men) are mara’akámes or shamans. Furst adds that an even greater number of the Huichol, male and female, are also artists.
A central aspect of the religious life of the Huichol, and an essential rite of every shaman, is the peyote pilgrimage to Wirikuta, a remote desert region 300 miles away in the state of San Luis Potosi. After the twenty day walk (now sometimes shortened by a ride on a truck or bus) to Wirikuta the Huichol pilgrims “hunt” for the sacred hikuri or peyote cactus. They shoot arrows into the first peyote they find, just like the sacred deer with which it is associated. The pilgrims consume some of the peyote in rituals in Wirikuta, and the rest is brought back for the consumption of the community.
The yarn paintings shown at Indigo Arts are the continuation of a variety of ritual arts long practiced by the Huichol. The Huichol are known for the symbolic patterns of plants and animal spirits, which they lavish on their cross-stitch embroidery, xukuri beaded gourd votive bowls, and a variety of prayer objects and crosses woven of sticks, feathers, yarn and other materials, which they called nierika.