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.

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, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, 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. 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, 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, Arizona 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. She is currently a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy.

#SaraFlores