Image Gallery: Kristen T. Woodward
To view the artist’s gallery, click on the image thumbnail. AAPLAC extends special thanks to Kristen T. Woodward of Albright College for suggesting this feature and for providing helpful guidance with its design. We are excited to include some of her art on this page.
Kristen T. Woodward
Professor of Art, Albright College
Boruka jaguar
My paintings inspired by Boruca traditions and legends attempt to explore states of shamanic transformation. Rather than appropriate Boruca imagery directly, I translated their iconography into my own aesthetic and spiritual traditions in a desire to have dialogue about broader relationships between art and conquest, commercial art versus personal expression, ecology, and archetypal transformation. It is my hope that viewers engage in this visual dialogue, and become curious about the Boruca.
Authority
My paintings inspired by Boruca traditions and legends attempt to explore states of shamanic transformation. Rather than appropriate Boruca imagery directly, I translated their iconography into my own aesthetic and spiritual traditions in a desire to have dialogue about broader relationships between art and conquest, commercial art versus personal expression, ecology, and archetypal transformation. It is my hope that viewers engage in this visual dialogue, and become curious about the Boruca.
Altered States
My paintings inspired by Boruca traditions and legends attempt to explore states of shamanic transformation. Rather than appropriate Boruca imagery directly, I translated their iconography into my own aesthetic and spiritual traditions in a desire to have dialogue about broader relationships between art and conquest, commercial art versus personal expression, ecology, and archetypal transformation. It is my hope that viewers engage in this visual dialogue, and become curious about the Boruca.
Having a long-established interest in Latin American art, I team taught a lecture-studio hybrid course titled Revolutions with Dr. Elizabeth Kiddy at Albright College, up until her death in 2014. In the spring of 2019 I had the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica with a small group of students and colleagues to research and develop a new interdisciplinary course on art and biology. The trip significantly inspired my own artistic practice. The result was a new body of paintings that explore the shamanic traditions and zoomorphic art of the Boruca people. More specifically, I witnessed a ceremony performed by tribal leaders in the Talamanca Mountains that involved human-animal jaguar transformations. Subsequent research expanded my understanding of the desire by contemporary Boruca to expose a broader community to their history and beliefs.
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