Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín is a Tz’utujil Mayan artist who lives and works in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. A graduate of the National School of Plastic Arts in Guatemala, he is a member of the TEI-CA group, a workshop for interdisciplinary studies and research in science and art, previously directed by Roberto Cabrera (2003-2014). His work is developed around the construction of a permanent memory, in the tension between the past and the present of his cultural roots, as a mechanism for vindicating collective experiences.

In this sense, Pichillá Quiacaín walks the path of Tz’utujil cultural references and practices through a silenced history. To do so, he dialogues with the teachings of his direct family environment, a pillar of the transmission of knowledge in the Tz’utujil communities for the transgenerational preservation of their values, despite the erasure that has occurred since the first colonial contact. Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín, therefore, deconstructs and reconstructs traditional textile practices, through techniques such as the backstrap loom, among others, to demonstrate its potential for creating codices, aesthetics and glyphs. On the one hand, this gesture removes the strictly anthropological meaning of the existence of Tz’utujil art and returns it to the contemporary, dignified, on an equal footing with contemporary paradigmatic practices.

On the other hand, through painting and audiovisuals, Pichillá Quiacaín revisits the Western canon in a gesture of counter-exploitation of knowledge, a phagocytizing of that which serves in order to redefine it, as a claim from the marginal.

Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín has participated in solo and collective exhibitions at different international institutions, such as the Barbican Centre, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; 11 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Para Site, Hong Kong; Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial, São Paulo; Denver Art Museum, Denver; MGLC – International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua Guatemala; Hessel Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama, Panama City. Additionally, his work belongs to public and private collections such as Tate Modern, London; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid;Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Banco de España Collection, Madrid; Inter-American Development Bank, Washington; Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York; IL POSTO, Santiago; Quinto Lojo Collection, Guatemala City; Sayago & Pardon – SPACE Collection, California; Luiz Chrysóstomo Collection, Rio de Janeiro; Poma Family Collection, Miami; D+C Family Collection, Miami; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami, among others.