Cooper Hewitt says...
Olga de Amaral (Colombian, born 1932) is a visual artist known for her large-scale woven works. With a career spanning over six decades, she is one of the most influential South American artists working today.
De Amaral was born Olga Ceballos Vélez in Bogotá, Colombia, the sixth of eight children. After completing her bachelor’s degree in architectural drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, she became director of the Architectural Drawing Department at the same school. In 1954, she enrolled at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she spent a year studying weaving with Marianne Strengell. There, she developed her lifelong passion for fiber, color, and woven structures. She also met her future husband, fellow artist Jim Amaral.
De Amaral returned to Colombia and continued weaving, supplying hand-woven textiles to fashion and interior designers. She and Jim married in 1957 and settled in Bogotá, where they established a design studio and workshop. Jim, a sculptor, built furniture, and Olga created fabrics for draperies and upholstery. At the same time, she began creating tapestries, experimenting with split warps and wrapping techniques; she always considered her parallel explorations across art and design to be complementary practices. She founded the Textile Department at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá in 1965, where she remained director until 1972. In 1968 she was appointed the Columbian representative to the World Crafts Council, and later as the assembly’s Latin American representative; she served in the position from 1970 to 1974.
De Amaral had her first solo exhibition outside Colombia in 1966, at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Venezuela. From that point on, her work was exhibited often as she increasingly became a leader in the international fiber arts movement. Her work was shown at seven of the International Tapestry Biennials in Lausanne, the pivotal Wall Hangings exhibition curated by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in a solo exhibition entitled Woven Walls at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Arts and Design), among other prestigious venues. The first major publication on her work, Olga de Amaral, desarrollo del lenguaje, by Cuban artist and writer Galaor Carbonell, was published in 1979, and the first retrospective exhibition of her work was presented at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá in 1993. Other retrospectives followed, in 2018 at The Patinoire Royale in Belgium and in 2020 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Cranbrook Academy of Art.
De Amaral is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973), the Museum of Arts & Design’s Visionary Artist Award (2005), and a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women’s Caucus for Art. Her work is held in the permanent collections of museums around the world.
