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and Mariá Dávila’s Viaje (Journey), 2018 (pp. 86-
87), a reflection of their career-long commitment
to understanding their chosen medium and the
challenging path to create it. The couple lives in
Mérida, the foothills of the Venezuelan Andes,
having found refuge from their homeland’s polit-
ical unrest in the mountainous region. While the
duo’s search to understand each component in
their work led them to travel the globe—studying
indigo in Asia, metal-wrapped threads in Europe,
and silk harvesting in China and India—Venezue-
la’s textile traditions were of equal research. The
couple treaded into Venezuela’s remote moun-
tain communities learning to work with native
fibers like the moriche (palm) used in this piece.
Viaje suggests the interconnectedness of their
knowledge and the communities that have been
their safe spaces. As a result, the piece brings
together the sophistication of weaving and bas-
ketry and the data storage of a computer chip,
its information and the complex journey to get
there embedded into each thread.
always has been and, despite everything, is now
in furtive and inarticulate ways: an irrepressible,
anarchic, healing human response without which
life is a mistake.”8 As the artists in this exhibition
testify, beauty is resistance and it is antidote.
Elizabeth Essner
Windgate Foundation Associate Curator of Craft
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The late great art critic Peter Schjeldahl (1942-
2022) declared in a 1996 New York Times piece,
that “Beauty is Back.” Among his musings, he
imagined beauty’s meaning a century later: 2096.
In the future, he predicted “beauty will be what it
1 See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, (Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
2 Rachel Carson. “Rachel Carson Answers Her Critics,” Audu-
bon Magazine, published September / October 1963, re-
printed July 19, 2024, https://www.audubon.org/magazine/
archives-rachel-carson-answers-her-critics.
3 Biologist and author Janine Benyus coined the term biomim-
icry. For further information see Janine Benyus, Biomimicry:
Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow / Quill, 1998).
4 For a concise history of philosophical views on beauty see:
Crispin Sartwell, “Beauty,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, eds. Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (Fall 2024
Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/
beauty.
5 Susan Sontag, “An argument about beauty,” Dædalus:
Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 131,
Number 4 (Fall, 2002): 22.
6 Ibid: 21
7 Heartney, Eleanor. “Foreword: Cutting Two Ways with Beau-
ty,” in Beauty Matters. ed. Peg Zeglin Brand. Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2002, xv.
8 Peter Schjeldahl, “Beauty is Back,” New York Times, Sep-
tember 29, 1996, Section 6, 161.
Debra Valoma, 20dv Clytemnestra (Undone), copper wire, woven, patinated, unwoven, wound, series of 5 balls, 6” x 6” to 12” x 12”, 2001
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