Maria José Murillo: Weaving as a Matrix of Re-existence

In this lecture, Peruvian artist and cultural worker María José Murillo presents weaving as the core of her practice: an embodied process through which she reaches simultaneously into the ancient past and toward the future to critically engage the layered complexities of her cultural identity. Her trajectory—from Peru to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and back to the Ande—shaped her engagement with weaving as a system of care, thought, and transformation. Working across backstrap, floor, vertical, and digital looms, she explores the haptic, structural, processual, and epistemic dimensions of textiles to reawaken ancestrality while juxtaposing Indigenous, colonial, and contemporary techniques alongside heterogeneous knowledge systems, which, although held in tension, interact reciprocally. Through material research, collaborative processes, and encounters with pre-Columbian and living textile traditions, her work positions weaving as a matrix of re- existence, where opposites neither negate nor assimilate one another but coexist in dynamic contradiction, forming a plural, layered woven whole.

María José Murillo (Peru, 1989) is an artist, textile maker and cultural worker born and raised in the south of Peru. She holds a MFA in Studio through the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017–2019) and a BFA in Painting from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2006–2011). Following her graduate studies, she led the Education Department at the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco in 2019. In 2021, she co-founded the art collective Noqanchis with Andean weavers from Pitumarca, Cusco. Murillo has participated in the WIELS Residency in Brussels in 2022 (ICPNA–Artus Scholarship) and the Recherches Residency at the Musée de la Tapisserie et des Arts Textiles in Tournai (2024). She has served on the Board of Directors of the Textile Society of America and participated in the Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry (2025). Her work, together with Noqanchis, is currently featured in the “On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival at the Art Institute of Chicago” (Sept 6, 2025 – Mar 15, 2026). In 2026 she will participate in the Vila Sul Residency Goethe-Institute in Salvador-Bahia.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies.

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