Exhibition Opening Reception for uYAKu: Sonido Líquido
Soledad Chango is a member of the Kichwa Salasaka community in Ecuador, dedicated to Indigenous language revitalization and culturally rooted educational practices. She is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, with an M.Sc. in Linguistics from MIT, where she researched Kichwa prosody. She is also a Fulbright alumna of the FLTA program at Cornell University.
Soledad is the founder and director of the Kukuya Initiative, through which she has developed Kichwa language curricula, created youth storytelling programs, and still organizes language exchange and mentorship opportunities for Indigenous students. She also oversaw the language programs at the Kichwa Institute of Science, Technology, and Humanities, where she launched Ecuador’s first Kichwa Science Bee and expanded Kichwa translation and educational resources.
Her publications include “Visibilizando el Kichwa Salasaka: Un análisis desde el Paisaje Lingüístico” (2025) and “Technology for L1 Kichwa/L2 Spanish Speakers’ Vowel Sound Production of English as Their L3” (2021).
Thomas B. F. Cummins is the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University and Director of Dumbarton Oaks. He received his PhD from UCLA. His research and teaching focuses on pre-Columbian and Latin American colonial art. He was Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago 1991-2002 and Director of the Latin American Center. He was Professeur invite, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris in 2016 and 2019. He has also taught in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. He was the interim director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University. He is a member of the Cisneros Institute Advisory Board, MoMA. He has lectured in 24 countries. He has published over a hundred fifty essays and eleven books, the two most recent being an edited Volume Global Gold: Aesthetics, Material Desires, Economies in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, Florence: I Tatti 2024, and a co-edited Sacred Matters: Animism and Authority in the Pre-Columbian Americas with Steve Koisiba and John Janusek, Dumbarton Oaks: Washington DC, 2020; He is the Editor in Chief Grove Encyclopedia of Latin American Art Oxford University Press. He was awarded The Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures, awarded by Modern Language Association, 2014, and The Bryce Wood Book Award to the outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English, awarded by The Latin American Studies Association, 2013. He received La Orden “Al Mérito por Servicios Distinguidos En el Grado de Gran Cruz” bestowed by the Republic of Peru 2011, and he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. He is the co-director of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art History Grant: Afro-Latin American Art: Building the Field 2022-2026.
Felipe Ledesma Núñez is an Ecuadorian sculptor and historian of sound whose work engages the Andean colonial archive and its sonic traces through the creation of ceramic sound artifacts. Ledesma earned a PhD in musicology from Harvard University and is now a fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Samuel Tejeda Ramírez is an artist and researcher whose practice engages Mesoamerican craft traditions across clay, metal, wood, bone, amber, and leather. Tejeda trained in ceramics and jewelry at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and studied ethnology at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Tejeda’s practice integrates formal experimentation with anthropological inquiry to explore Indigenous technologies, cosmologies, and ritual. Tejeda has exhibited nationally and internationally, and leads Ichtli Maori Studio in Mexico City, dedicated to ceramic research, teaching, and creation.
