Donna Huanca is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the human body and the natural world through mark-making, raw materials, immersive environments, and singular topographies. Encompassing painting, sculpture, and live performance, as well as sound and scent works, Huanca’s installations are characteristically created for, and integrate with, the specific architectural spaces in which they are presented. 

Inspired by Indigenous systems of communication, where objects serve as multi-purpose signifiers, Huanca uses objects and materials as repositories that aggregate and convey knowledge, information, and memory. Her art is deeply invested in communal practice, exploring ritual at large as a means for transcendence, meditation and transformation. Since 2012, Huanca has collaborated with performers, inviting them to improvise and interact with her surrounding sculpture and installations, their painted skin a major element in the composition.

Huanca’s sinuous, abstract paintings extend the life cycle of her performances by merging the transience of performance art with the permanence of painting. The surfaces of her paintings are built upon images of bodies photographed during these performances, printed onto canvas and overpainted. Camouflaged by oil paint of vibrantly colored hues and tantalizing textural dimension, Huanca’s hallucinatory kaleidoscopes are distinguished by the intermixing of oil pigments with sand and other natural materials. Fascinated by the cyclical processes of birth, decay, and renewal, Huanca explores in her work the transformation and fluidity of the body and earthly cycles.

Huanca earned her B.F.A. in 2004 from the University of Houston, Texas. Upon graduation, she was awarded the prestigious DeGolyer Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art, 2004, followed by a fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, 2006. She then relocated to Frankfurt, Germany to attend the Städelschule, Hochschule für Bildende Künste. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, 2012 (Mexico City), and an honoree at the Hirshhorn Museum, 2016, Huanca’s groundbreaking practice has been exhibited, performed, and collected internationally. Recent major exhibitions of the artist’s work include Zuzeum, Riga, Latvia, Sean Kelly, New York, Faurschou, New York, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Nitsch Foundation, Vienna.

Her work is part of international collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, USA, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Espacio 1414/Berezdivin Collection, Santurce, Puerto Rico; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, USA; Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, Spain; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Sifant Art museum, Nanjing, China; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others.