Alicia Viteri

Alicia Viteri (born 1946 in Pasto, Colombia) is a Panamanian artist who is a leading figure in Latina contemporary art. Viteri began her career with printmaking and installations and then turned to digital arts later on the mid-to-late 1990s.

Education and career

In 1968, Alicia Viteri was a college student at the Centro Colombia-Norte Americano in Bogota, Colombia, where she participated in her very first group exhibition as an artist. In 1970, she was a graduate from the School of Fine Arts at the Universidad de los Andres, also in Bogota, Colombia.

In 1972, Viteri moved to Panama, where she had her very first solo exhibition. Within the same year, she began working as a professor at the University of Panama for a printmaking course.

For a very short time, Viteri lived and worked in Ecuador from 1977-78.

Exhibition and works 1970-76 was a period of intense pictorial activity and participation in local and international exhibitions and biennials. One of Viteri's first artistic activities was in 1970 with the Young Artists Biennia at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bogota, Colombia. Three years later, she participated in the Second Graphic Arts Biennial in Cali, Colombia and then later, her work was featured in the Casa de la Cultura (House of Culture) in Quito, Ecuador.

Viteri's art incorporates many types of media, including drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, fabric, book making, and even audio for her famous installation/mural titled Pictorial Space (held on a 7m x 2.7m fabric surface). Viteri's work displays an interest in insects and she developed a powerful passion for observing them at the Printmaking Workshop at the Universidad de los Andres, under the supervision of Umberto Giangrandi and the knowing gaze of Juan Antonio Roda. Later on in Viteri's artwork, these beetles, ants and flies slowly become humanized, which is taken to represent an examination of the inner self.

The exhibition includes the primary drafts for the mural, along with the series of drawings and prints of insects and the series entitled The Mummy. In 2009, it won second place for Best Arts Book in the Spanish/Bilingual category of the 11th Annual International Latino Book Awards. The landscape she has been working on since sometime ago became a parallel production that allows her to approach color and to leave behind the black- and- white world of her insects, carnivals, and funerals while deepening her mastery of the craft of painting. They are bright, full-of-life photos of her family and friends, mixed with digital design.

In the middle of her new project, Viteri became very ill and while overcoming all obstacles with great tenacity, and with the support of Benjamin Villegas, the book project moved forward and came to life. The project was finished and launched in March 2009 in Panama City, and in mid-April in Bogota at the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Cultural Center. Alicia Viteri created these pieces of artwork by putting her pictorial and graphic expertise to the limit by using the services provided by technology. She used computer software to replace brushes, burins, and the sharp point of a pencil. The format of the book features a violet silk cover and the image of Alicia as a child, which turns into a delicate object. A translucent-paper sheet precedes it as if one was looking through a photo-album.