Crafts, color and art in Latin America
Pots, tableware, fabrics, and other ornaments make up the crafts and popular art in Latin America, which is native to each region and essential to understanding each town’s artistic legacy.
Sustainability
The crafts are made by hand,
Each handcrafted piece transits halfway between beauty and utility, hand in hand with creativity.
Considered the younger sister of pure art, craftsmanship concentrates, in its vast tradition, centuries of shared knowledge, repeated manual movements, materials that persist over time, and many others that are inheriting past glories. The pieces created using thousands of techniques are the tangible sign of the human capacity to preserve helpful knowledge that is also beautiful.
In some way or another, we have all enjoyed or used objects made through pottery (manipulation of mud or clay), cabinetmaking (wood and derivatives), embroidery (decoration with thread), blacksmithing (forged iron or aluminum), weaving ( crochet, among other textile fibers), ceramics (modeled in clay and burned at high temperatures), glass ceramics, costume jewelry (accessories made from a variety of natural materials), or basketry (vegetable fiber weaving with various volumes).
In the south of Colombia in Pasto-Nariño, their artisans have developed a technique known as the veneer in the trash. This process consists of making decorations with a waist of wheat that are applied to the wood. These pieces are made with the bottom of the wheat, also called tamo, which is opened in half and thus removing thin sheets from which it proceeds to cut and obtain threads. After this process, it is painted and applied to the piece of wood, which is coated with lacquers, sealers, and varnish when its decoration is finished. The woods used are before stable and have gone through a drying process necessary for an impeccable completion of the artisan piece. The colors most used to make this craft are bright colors showing a tropical air, ideal for interior decoration.