Bio

Arrieta is a Peruvian-born interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores cultural memory, material inheritance, identity, and relationships to land through painting, textiles, and material-based processes. Arrieta studied art and drawing in Lima, Perú, and later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Art History from Indiana University Fort Wayne. Living between Perú and the United States has informed her ongoing interest in questions of home, displacement, and cultural inheritance. Her background inspires her to create art grounded in her lived experiences of migration, cultural memory, and identity, engaging with ancient Andean textile traditions, architecture, and material culture. While painting remains central to her practice, she increasingly engages textiles, organic materials, and spatial interventions as extensions of the painted surface. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Arrieta integrates painting, weaving, embroidery, soil, clay, and organic materials to examine connections between land, labor, memory, and tradition. Her work draws inspiration from ancient Andean textile practices and explores how ancestral knowledge can be reinterpreted through contemporary forms. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Garret Museum of Art, Customs House Museum in Clarksville, and Cambridge Art Association in Massachusetts. Arrieta has received juried awards from the University of Florida, Purdue University of Fort Wayne, and the Asociación de Pro-Derechos Humanos in Lima, Perú. Arrieta is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Florida, her current research investigates ancient Andean textile traditions and pre-Hispanic material culture, expanding her studio practice across drawing, painting, textiles, sculpture, and installation.

In my practice, I draw from the history of Peruvian Andean art and Western modernism to create hybrid paintings that explore cultural memory, materiality, and the persistence of tradition within contemporary life. Materiality plays a central role in my work. Through layered surfaces, texture, gesture, weaving, embroidery, soil, clay, and material processes, I use form to examine how cultural traditions are preserved, transformed, and carried into the present. While painting remains the foundation of my practice, the surface becomes a site where cultural identity, memory, and contemporary experience intersect. Drawing from ancient Andean iconography, textile traditions, and architectural forms, my work investigates the continuity of cultural knowledge across generations. By layering and indexing ancestral visual language, I investigate how traditions survive, adapt, and acquire new meanings within contemporary social and political contexts. I seek to create works that invite viewers to experience a sense of tension between material presence and cultural memory, where materials serve as an act of cultural preservation, and my work encourages reflection on the importance of maintaining relationships to land, cultural inheritance, place, and history, and the ways traditions continue to shape contemporary life.

MARIA DEL PILAR ARRIETA

EDUCATION

MFA, Studio Art in Painting, University of Florida, 2027-Expected Year

Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies, University of Florida, 2027-Expected Year

BFA, Painting, Indiana University,  Fort Wayne, IN 2021

Minor in Art History, Indiana University, Fort Wayne, IN 2021

EXHIBITIONS

Nothing in Mind Right Now, Pennant Place, Gainesville, FL, 2026

Voices: Intercultural Dialogue, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2026

Six Forms of Address, Hippodrome Theatre, Gainesville, FL, 2026

UF Juried Student Exhibition, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2026

Inherited, 4Most Gallery, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2025

Resisting Through Tradition, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2025

Institute for Collecting Pedagogies, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2025

Colorful Existence, Ignite Studio Gallery, Fishers, IN, 2025

Juried Student Exhibition, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2025

An Incomplete Collection of Impossible Projects, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2024

Dual Exhibition, Thyen-Clark Cultural Center Gallery, Jasper, IN, 2024

The Life & Culture of Modern Day Latinidad, Studio Montclair Gallery, NJ, 2023

Arte Latino Now, Queens University of Charlotte, NC, 2022–2023

International Virtual Art Exhibit, Madrid, Spain, 2022

International Art Fair Monaco, Monaco, 2022

BFA Senior Thesis Exhibition, Fort Wayne, IN, 2021

PUBLIC ART & COMMISSIONS

Spatial Instinct, Fort Wayne Traffic Cabinet Project, Fort Wayne, IN, 2024

Cybernetical Space, Packard Traffic Cabinet Project, Fort Wayne, IN, 2023

Foxes, Franke Park Elementary School Crosswalk Mural, Fort Wayne, IN, 2023

AWARDS & HONORS

Juried Award, UF Juried Student Exhibition, 2026

Second Place Award, Juried Art & Design Student Exhibition, 2021

Lola Martinez Scholarship, 2020

Auer Fine Arts Scholarship, 2019–2020

Donna A. Jesse Arts Scholarship, 2019

Betty Fishman Fine Arts Endowed Scholarship, 2018

First Place Award, Lima, Peru,1997

PUBLICATIONS & PRESS

PBS Fort Wayne, Art IN Focus, 2024

PFW Confluence Magazine, Girl Sleeping, 2021

The Journal Gazette, Forces of Nature, 2021

Pique Magazine, Chancay Earrings, 2018