Esther Parada’s trip to Bolivia in the 1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer marked the beginning of her artistic career as a photographer.
While teaching art at the university in Sucre, she captured the expressive faces, richly patterned textiles, and harsh light of the altiplano as a way to retain and memorize the experience of living among the Indigenous peoples of the Andes. Married to a Bolivian, Parada was a champion of Latin American photography and art. She later became a professor of photography at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1974, a position she held for thirty years.
This image, taken in Tarabuco, Bolivia, sometime between 1964 and 1966, shows what she called “campesinos in church, Easter Sunday,” meaning the peasant farmers and workers of the countryside.
During National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs through October 15, Mia is celebrating the work of Parada by showing this and several other photographs by her in the lobby. More works by Latin American artists are always on view in gallery 275.
Read about Valéria Piccoli, Mia’s curator of Latin American art, and her plans for growing the collection.