Donna Huanca: MAGMA SLIT | Apr 2, 2022 – Feb 5, 2023

Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca (b. 1980, Chicago, IL) creates work that destabilizes the male gaze while exploring femme and indigenous, specifically Andean, narratives and mark-making. Huanca’s installations encompass painting, sculpture, and live performance, and are characteristically created for, and integrated with, the specific architectural spaces in which they are presented. Her art is deeply invested in ritual practice, both drawn from Andean culture and exploring ritual at large as a means for transcendence, meditation, and transformation. As the title of the installation at the Henry, MAGMA SLIT, suggests, Huanca’s recent work melds those concerns with ideas emergent around her recent motherhood—magma as the blood of the earth (the original mother), slit referencing an opening, or as the artist cites, “a stretch mark”—along with the cellular, even zygotic shapes repeated throughout.

For this commissioned exhibition, the artist creates an architecturally immersive environment consisting of a vast stage of interlocking ovoid/cellular forms, landscaped with white sand and supporting six mirrored “screen” sculptures. The steel sculptures, each titled PUERTA DE TRENZAS (Gate of Braids), have precision cuts excised into each surface, sourced from the artist’s drawings of small groups of human figures and crowds, creating absence where the collective human figures would be. Long swaths of braided, colored hair adorn the works, like metonymic talismans. In contrast, other sculptural forms of varying scale reside throughout the landscape, organic in silhouette and surface treatment, and reference both extraterrestrial archeology and weighty bodily presence. Four mural-sized paintings surround the stage; each represent one of the four seasons, and bear the same title as the exhibition overall. As viewers journey through the space, they are invited to experience a kaleidoscopic engagement with their own reflection and the works.

A large, curved corner wall hosts a wall rubbing, as does the turret space. Executed in a private performance by an invited dancer as a proxy for the artist, the rubbings provide human scale to the monumentality of the site. They function both as trace of the individual, as well as the body in space, writ large. Viewers enter the turret individually, and within that intimate space—both heightening and relieving the vast and destabilizing journey through the gallery—experience the sound and olfactory works as well. Huanca layers the scents in the olfactory piece from site to site, adding elements evocative of the different natural region they inhabit. Smell being recognized as one of the strongest triggers of memory, the artist intends the notes of wet, burnt earth, palo santo, copal, and leather, among other subtle cues, to free the space for the viewer’s individual translation and connection. The sound piece heard in the space exists as four chapters, referencing the four elements, seasons, and cardinal directions. Huanca refers to them as sonic collages, samples from her surroundings, people in her life, and online; deeply interested in the use of binaural beats, the sound can function as a meditative guide, both for the audience and when the exhibition is activated by performers.

A complete sensory experience, the installation aims to evoke a slippage of space and time inviting participants to both find and lose themselves. Throughout the length of the exhibition, the Henry, the artist, and cultural performers of all genres will work together to produce a series of programs in dialogue with the exhibition’s themes, performed on a sculptural auxiliary stage created expressly for those events.

Huanca’s exhibition is the first commissioned work supported by the Richard E. and Jane Lang Davis New Works Fund. A complimentary publication will accompany the exhibition.

Donna Huanca completed her education at the University of Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and Städelschule, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She has completed several residencies, including at SmackMellon, Brooklyn; Access Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; and Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Huanca is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship; Art Matters Grant, New York; Francis Greenberg Award, Art OMI, New York; DeGolyer Grant, Dallas Museum of Art; and a 2016 Hirshhorn Artist Honoree. She has had solo exhibitions at the Marfa Ballroom; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; and Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria. Huanca has featured her work in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; and Malmö Konsthalle, Sweden. Her work is held in the collections of the Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.