Spotlight: Sara Flores

DECEMBER 10, 2025-JANUARY 17, 2026

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Sara Flores’s Untitled (Ani Bero Maya Kené), 2025. A text by poet and educator Natalie Diaz accompanies the presentation.

lines in defense of my land
By Natalie Diaz 

The line is dueña and has no dueño.

My beloved believes, the line is an intentional geography.

I feel the river when she says this.

Long line snaking my body and my land—

                                    mira   mi vida   mi geografía   mi río  

                 mi cuerpo de tierra

Even the abrasion stone bears its desire lines as text.

 To stop this world from disappearing,

I speak to the plants as sisters—

verde   rojo   hermana   marrón   amarillo

then dream our line and lineage—

draw the stick like medicine across the wild cotton.

mano   sana   sueño   linea   deseo   diseño

We are ancestors and descendants. The supernova,

                  and the gold and iron the supernova rained down.

How roots anchor and branch at the same time, two-hearted—

tela y telaraña

The weaver and what she has woven.

The line is the element that began me.

The line is the element that remains of me—

umbilical, shadow and mirror.

raíces   mamá   ramas   hoja   hijas  

            sombra   espejo   reflejo   cordón

The line is the oldest story:

On the Ucayali’s banks, beneath the settlers’ loud garbage,

      the anaconda enters the river’s black water,

ronin   orilla   río   oscuro

            turbia   extraña   historía            

her submerged body thuds softly,

      shifting the silt and leaf-laden mud,   

raising golden cumulus clouds through the shallows,

agua   anaconda   sedimentado  

 nubes de limo   dorado

hematite eyes horizon the surface,

her head splits the dark course’s currents

in an ancient arrow of lathed light—

ojo   hierro   horizonte  

  flecha   cabeza   luz

Settlers shed our lands of the forests, murk the waters and crumble the ravines—

To keep from disappearing the snakes sheds its skin

     and the spectacle of the eye.

The plants and I root and thrive in the black soil of the line,

      sowing the memory field of what tomorrow might yet yield.

My intentional geography—to shed my own laborious maps and skins,

because the line who remembers herself,

      is the line who can be returned to the future,

                  or what the word futuro once meant—We are,

                                                                                                            and continue to be.

                                                      u na   li   nea

                                                      me   di   cina

                                                                   ‘amat   ‘iimat

                                                                    mat ichev

             ‘ahot

 ‘ahota

‘ahotaank

*Mojave words: ‘amat land, ‘iimat body, mat ichev medicine or doctor, ‘ahot good, ‘ahota it is good, ‘ahotaank it is very good

** Spanish words are threaded by sound as well as meaning but held to Mojave structures of nouns and verbs being like, so they are conjugated or not based on aural physicality and image, not grammatically

*** Italics are intended to be “heard language,” so either spoken or song-words

About:

Sara Flores (b. 1950, Tambomayo, Peru) is an artist living and working in Yarinacocha, Peru. A member of the Shipibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, she is regarded as one of the leading practitioners of kené, the intricate design system central to her culture’s cosmovision and artistic production. Flores’s recent solo exhibitions include Bakish Mai, White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK (2025); Non Nete. A Dream for an Indigenous Nation, Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Lima, Peru (2025); Sara Flores, White Cube, Paris, France (2023); Soi Biri, CLEARING, New York, NY (2023), among others. Flores has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Maison CLEARING, Bannwartweg 39, Basel, Switzerland (2025); Contemporary Amazon. Works from the Hochschild Correa Collection – Peru, Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid, Spain (2025); Contemporary 1. Matter :: Alchemy :: Device :: Flow, MAC Lima, Peru (2024); Ayahuasca & Art of the Amazon, Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK (2024); Shamanic Visions. Ayahuasca Arts in Peruvian Amazonia, Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris, France (2023); signals…瞬息 (signals…folds and splits), Para Site, Hong Kong, China; A Mind Made of Silk, CLEARING, Brussels, Belgium (2023); Something Beautiful – Reframing la Colección, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2023); This far and further, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2023); Meridians, Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, Florida (2022); Rivers can exist within waters but not without shores, Museum of Contemporary Art of Lima, Lima, Peru (2022); and Maya maya bainkin. Avanzando dando vueltas. Arte y Futuro Shipibo, Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Peru, Lima, Peru (2022). Flores’s work can be found in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Tate, London; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Al Thani Collection, Paris, France; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the Hochschild Correa Collection, Lima, Peru; the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Lima, Peru; the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; the New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital Contemporary Art Collection, Brooklyn, NY; The Shipibo Conibo Center, New York, NY;  and the UBS Art Collection, New York, NY. In 2024, Flores was selected for the ninth edition of the Dior Lady Art project, collaborating with the brand to reimagine the iconic Lady Dior bag. Flores’s work is currently included in Amazonia, Art at Americas Society, New York, NY;  and in the Bienal das Amazônias, Belém, Brazil. Sara Flores has been selected to represent Peru for their national pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennial of Art, set to open in May 2026.

Natalie Diaz was born on the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, CA, on the banks of the Colorado River. Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham). She is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (2021), finalist for the National Book Award (2020), Forward Prize in Poetry (2020), and Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2020), and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award (2021). Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize (2014). Diaz is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected the youngest ever Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Diaz splits here time between her homelands in Phoenix, AZ, and along the waterways of Manahatta in New York. She was recently awarded a 2023 and 2024 Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship, an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Shining Light Fellowship, a 2024 Margaret Casey Foundation Freedom Fellow, and also served as the Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence in 2024 and 2025. Diaz is currently a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy.

#SaraFlores