Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
purity of the Virgin with the purity of Cerro Rico's silver and Pachamama - the Andean earth
goddess herself.
Modern art
There's a whole room dedicated to the elegant torsos of Bolivian sculptress
Marina Nuñez
del Prado
yet the most compelling among the museum's modern pieces are arguably the
works of
Cecilio Gúzmán de Rojas
, a leading figure in the Indigenismo movement of the
early 20th century. His stylized depictions of the Andean feminine face are hugely compel-
ling, strong and almost cat-like in their grace and power. His most striking work is probably
the wall-sized
Mujeres Andinas
, an aquiline huddle of women under a blazing sky alive with
animist spirits.
Museo de Etnografía y Folklore
Corner of Ingavi and Gerardo Sanjinez • Mon-Fri 9am-noon & 3-6.30pm, Sat 9am-4pm, Sun till 12.30pm •
Bs15 •
www.musef.org.bo
Set inside an elegant colonial mansion on calle Ingavi is the small but rewarding
Museo de
Etnografía y Folklore
, housed in a seventeenth-century mansion built for the Marques de
Villaverde, whose coat of arms looks down on the central patio from an exquisite mestizo-
Baroque portico, complete with floral designs, parrots and feline figures. The mansion's
street facade boasts the only surviving example of the elegant carved wooden balconies that
were common in colonial La Paz, and there's a branch of the ubiquitous
Angelo Colonial
café
chain attached.
Inside, the museum has an exhibition on the history of
Andean ceramics
, with a horde of
largely anthropomorphic pieces from the Chimú, Chancay and Tiwanaku cultures, as well as
strange ritual
muñecas
(dolls), Inca
kerus
(ceremonial wooden cups), some lovely colonial
painted vases and a room dedicated to
Arte Plumario
, or feather art. Conferring honour and
respect on their wearers and serving as a kind of spiritual cleanser and conduit, the feath-
ers on display here are much more than simply cast-off plumage: the brilliant designs of the
Moxos plains are clearly reflections of the tropical sun, while the Altiplano incarnations are
conspicuous for their height; the Cabezade Phusipia headdress resembles a veritable flower
garden in the sky.
If these aren't surreal enough for you, the darkened
mask room
should suffice, a by turns
grotesque, outrageous, hilarious and never less than fascinating combination of the familiar
and the more obscure, including a Nazca death mask, lesser seen Chaco carnival masks and
the sinister
Aaqui Aaqui
from Charazani, a malformed doctor/lawyer parody.
The real feather in the museum's cap, however, has to be its exhaustive
textile room
, going
way back into the pre-Columbian era with tattered fragments from the Chimú, Tiwanaku,
Paracas, Nazca, Chancay and Inca cultures, much of it - in stark contrast to the more famil-
