By Marcella Echavarría
Marcella Echavarría curates Aracari Gallery, our online collection of art and design from across the Andes, and has long worked with the makers and brands keeping the region’s artistic traditions alive. Just back from Lima, she picks six artists, makers and places shaping contemporary Peruvian textile art right now, from Kristie Arias’s new exhibition to a restaurant where weaving meets the table.
I have just returned from Lima with the feeling that I have been moving through an entire universe of textiles. Fiber, color, knots, surfaces. Work that carries the memory of a landscape and, at the same time, seems ready to become something entirely unexpected.
As a curator, I am drawn to these moments when a material begins to connect things I had been considering separately. In Lima, textiles kept bringing me back to the same conversation: between artists and weavers, museums and ateliers, the intimacy of something worn and the physical presence of something that occupies a room.
I understand the growing presence of textiles in Lima’s art world through these overlapping movements: artists experimenting with fiber, curators revisiting established categories, museums broadening their collections, and collaborations bringing the knowledge of weavers into greater visibility. Lima is a meeting place for practices whose roots extend far beyond the city.
What follows are six places where I found that meeting most alive: an artist’s atelier, two museums holding very different histories, a designer working alongside weaving communities, a design studio and a restaurant. Together, they offer a way into Lima’s textile world as it stands today.
1. Kristie Arias and Fibra Lítica
My visit to Kristie Arias’s atelier in Barranco gave that conversation a very tangible form. I have known Kristie for close to twenty years. Over that time, I have watched her research, teach, collaborate, and persist, moving between art, fashion, museums, artisanship, and industry. Her work has the depth that comes from spending years with materials and with the people who understand them.
This time, I was particularly struck by the way her textiles are acquiring volume. Fiber accumulates. Surfaces deepen. Weaving begins to behave like sculpture. There is something geological about it: strata, sediment, the slow formation of a landscape.
That inquiry now takes form in Fibra Lítica, her new solo exhibition at the Museo Andrés del Castillo in Lima, on view from October 2 to 30, 2026. Curated by Daniel G. Alfonso, the exhibition brings together new works in alpaca, sheep’s wool and silk, developed through close observation of the museum’s mineral collection. Colors, transparencies and veins within the stones become starting points for weaving.
There is something beautiful about the patience this requires. To look at a mineral and begin to understand it through fiber. To follow a vein, consider a layer, imagine how a transparency might emerge on a loom. The investigation Kristie began with Paisaje Nodal in 2019 continues through another encounter with the earth.
In Fibra Lítica, textiles woven by hand in her Lima atelier sit alongside work developed using industrial Jacquard in specialized workshops in Arequipa. This exchange feels particularly coherent with the career I have watched unfold. Kristie carries knowledge between artisanal and industrial settings, exploring what each process makes possible.
The exhibition also incorporates research by Gabriela Juárez Ramos, her former student at UPC, into textile crystallization. Through chemical processes, crystals form on fibers and fabrics, introducing another way for textile and mineral to meet. Here, the geological connection becomes part of the material itself.
I find this moment in Kristie’s work particularly exciting. Years of looking, teaching and experimenting are coming together in an exhibition where art, scientific research and textile production can inform one another.
Visiting Fibra Lítica
For those in Lima this October: Fibra Lítica is on view at Museo Andrés del Castillo, Jr. de la Unión 1030, Centro Histórico, until October 30, 2026. Admission is free; the museum opens daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. A guided visit and conversation with Kristie Arias, Daniel G. Alfonso, Gabriela Juárez and textile designer John Esquivel takes place on October 17 at 11 a.m., followed by a crystallized textiles workshop on October 24. The closing event, Una Noche MAD, begins on October 30 at 7 p.m.
2. Museo Textil Precolombino Amano
In Peru, the larger conversation reaches back millennia. The collections of the Museo Textil Precolombino Amano reveal the extraordinary technical and visual sophistication of ancient textiles, from Paracas and Nasca to Chancay and Inca. Structure, pattern and color belong to a long history of invention. That history gives contemporary artists an immense field of knowledge to engage with.
The museum began as the private passion of Yoshitaro Amano, a Japanese businessman who settled in Lima in the 1950s and became captivated by the textiles of the Chancay valley, north of the city. At the time, almost no one was studying or collecting them. He opened the museum in Miraflores in 1964, and for most of its first fifty years it could only be visited by appointment.
The room dedicated to his Chancay collection is one of the most intimate museum experiences in Lima. Visitors can open the cabinets themselves and look closely at hundreds of pieces, one drawer at a time. Another room is given to raw materials and the tools of weaving, the starting point for everything else in the collection. Kristie herself held a solo exhibition at Amano in 2019, which feels fitting: the ancient and the contemporary have long shared these rooms.
3. MALI and Imaginarios contemporáneos
The relationship between textiles and modern art also has its own history. From the 1920s onward, Elena Izcue helped bring pre-Columbian visual languages into modern textile design and the decorative arts. More recently, Lima’s museums have been reconsidering whose work enters contemporary collections and how it is understood.
At MALI, Imaginarios contemporáneos, which opened in 2021, made this reconsideration explicit. Its program brought textile design and traditional knowledge into discussions of contemporary art, while the collection expanded its attention to practices beyond Lima. Conversations with artists including Olinda Silvano and Fátima Rodrigo explored inherited visual languages and their relationship to modernity. The museum’s account describes a deliberate widening of the story.
4. Mozhdeh Matin and Relatos Textiles
Mozhdeh Matin’s work grows through sustained relationships with textile communities in Peru. Her project Relatos Textiles explores territory and personal memory through these exchanges, beginning in Cajamarca, where she spent her early years.
Born in Peru to Iranian parents, Mozhdeh began visiting weaving communities in 2008, while still studying fashion, and saw how much ancestral knowledge was at risk as younger generations moved to the capital. She has worked with artisans across the country ever since, from a family of weavers in Ayacucho to the communities she returns to in Cajamarca, designing from her studio in Chorrillos, in the south of Lima.
What interests me is the continuity between research and making. A technique carries the experience of the person who practices it: the judgment of a hand, a familiarity with tension, an understanding of how a fiber will respond. In Mozhdeh’s practice, clothing becomes a place where that knowledge continues to develop. It can be worn, moved in and experienced against the body.
Her work will soon join the collection at Aracari Gallery, and I am looking forward to sharing it with a wider audience.
5. Puna
Puna, founded in Lima by visual artist Yerko Zlatar and interior designer Mariana Otero, approaches this relationship through objects and spaces. Its practice brings interiors, art direction and design into close contact with material.
There is a lovely specificity behind that broad vision. Puna’s Culto 02 rug, for example, is woven on a pedal loom by master weavers in San Pedro de Cajas, using locally sourced wool and hand-dyed colors. An object in a contemporary interior remains connected to a particular place, a process and the people who know how to make it.
I find myself increasingly interested in these connections. Who spun the fiber? Who developed the color? Who understood what the loom could do? Those decisions belong to the meaning of the finished work.
Puna’s work is available through Aracari Gallery, where you can bring a piece of that thinking into your own home.
6. Kjolle
Kjolle, Pía León’s restaurant in Barranco, is where the conversation extends to the table. The attention to Peru’s materials moves through the kitchen and into the room itself. Food, fiber, wood and stone offer different ways of approaching a territory.
The restaurant’s interior, designed by Estudio Rafael Freyre, includes a textile work made collaboratively by Ana Teresa Barboza and Elvia Paucar. I find that shared authorship particularly meaningful. Both makers are named, allowing us to recognize the relationship through which the work came into being. The studio’s account of Kjolle places the textile within its wider exploration of natural materials and artisanal processes.
Kjolle also holds work by Alejandra Ortiz de Zevallos. Through her collaboration with Mater Iniciativa on Khipuy, she learned to work with ichu, the Andean grass, alongside master maker Santiago Pilco in K’acllaraccay, Cusco. That research subsequently led to new pieces for Kjolle and Mauka. Her account of the process reveals how experimentation can grow through the exchange of knowledge.
For me, Kjolle adds another part to this story of textile art in Lima. A restaurant becomes a place to encounter an artist’s work, become curious about a fiber and follow its history back to the hands that shaped it. The care given to the origin of an ingredient can extend to a woven surface.
Lima’s textile world, still unfolding
In Lima, the textile world runs from the Chancay cabinets at Amano to an atelier in Barranco, from the galleries of MALI to a dining room on Avenida Pedro de Osma. What holds it together is people: weavers, artists, curators, designers and cooks, each carrying knowledge from one setting into another.
I came away wanting to spend more time with all of it. With Kristie’s textiles as they acquire weight, shadow and crystalline surfaces. With Mozhdeh’s ongoing conversations with weavers. With Puna’s understanding of objects and space, and the meeting of materials at Kjolle.
Perhaps this is what stays with me most: the sense of a textile culture still unfolding, through people who know it intimately and continue to ask what else it might become.
From Aracari Gallery
Kristie Arias’s textiles are part of the Aracari Gallery collection, alongside work by makers including País Textil, with pieces by Mozhdeh Matin arriving soon. Marcella can also arrange commissions directly with the artists.
Many of the makers behind the Gallery open their studios to Aracari travelers. If you’d like to meet them in Lima or Cusco, we can build a journey around Peru’s textile culture.