Ana Teresa Barboza

Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to present Ana Teresa Barboza: A Message from Water, the artist’s second solo exhibition in New York and the fourth with the gallery. Featuring a selection of new work, A Message from Water traces a journey through the changing landscape of Peru’s high forest, from the dry forests of the Utcubamba Valley to Gocta Waterfall, in the heart of the Amazonas region. Barboza reimagines the diverse terrain with her signature mixed-media textiles, created with locally sourced materials, incorporated into digital photographs.

Taking the form of a visual diary, A Message from Water follows the artist as she traverses eastward, placing the viewer in the position of a fellow traveler and inviting reflection on the deep connections between perception and movement. The artist connects transformations in the terrain to the changing rhythms of the body as it moves through space, seeking to recognize and understand its surroundings. Culminating in a colossal textile that mimics a waterfall, Y el agua cae otra vez/And the Water Falls Again (2026), the exhibition encourages viewers to contemplate cycles that constantly repeat, akin to the intuitive paths of waterways, which adapt and find their way through the cloud forest.

Traveling extensively throughout Peru, the artist engages with local craft traditions, learning methods of fabricating plant-based thread and dye from native communities. As her process begins with an exchange between people and land, it allows the creation of works that deeply reflect Peru’s diverse cultural-ecological landscapes and honor the histories of the communities in which she bases her research. Barboza weaves textiles out of threads made from materials she forages from the region, including agave fiber, alpaca wool, chambira fiber, and native cotton. Native plant materials, collected, pulverized, and boiled down in dyes, create the distinctly vibrant hues that make up Barboza’s compositions. By incorporating plant life sourced in the surrounding ecosystem of the Gocta Waterfall, she establishes a direct link between her pieces to the landscape that inspired them.

Continuing Barboza’s practice of preserving cultural and ecological knowledge from across the country of her birth, A Message from Water invites us to slow down and observe the patterns and variations of nature, changing our habitual rhythms and finding novel ways of relating to our environments, our communities, and ourselves.

Ana Teresa Barboza is a Peruvian multimedia artist whose practice transforms textile into a way of reading and inhabiting territory. Rooted in close attention to Peruvian landscapes, especially coastal wetlands and the dry forest ecosystems of northern Peru, her work considers how cycles of drought, water scarcity, and regeneration shape both the environment and the communities that live with it.

Ana Teresa Barboza (b. 1981, Lima, Peru) lives and works in Lobitos, Piura, Peru. She studied at the Faculty of Art of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Her work has been exhibited internationally in MALBA, Buenos Aires; Museo de Arte de Lima; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima; the 23rd Biennale of Sydney; the Cuenca Biennial; the Paiz Art Biennial; Helsinki Biennial; the Fashion and Textile Museum, London; Museum Rijswijk, Netherlands; the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Madrid; and the V&A, London. Barboza received the Passport for an Artist award from the French Embassy in Peru in 2006, First Prize in the Second National Painting Competition of the Central Reserve Bank of Peru in 2010, and the MAC National Art and Innovation Award in Lima in 2019. Her work is held in public and institutional collections including the V&A, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima; the Central Museum / Museum of the Central Reserve Bank of Peru; Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson, Madrid; the Moritz Hochschild Collection; and IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern.