Public Programs @ The Institute
Series: Pre-Columbian Society of New York
The Powerful Beings of the Cupisnique-Chavín World
Monday, April 20, 2026, 6:00pm
Hugo C. Ikehara-Tsukayama, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art-Cornell University
The archaeology and art history of the 1400-500 BCE era in the Central Andes has been dominated by the excavation of monumental ceremonial centers and the study of images deployed across multiple media, from large-scale mural art to ceramic vessels and other small objects. Until a couple of decades ago, the conventional narrative was that the cult of the divinities represented at Chavín de Huántar, a highland site with prominent stone sculpture, spread throughout the region alongside the Chavín culture. Decades of research have shown, however, that many sites were coeval or preceded Chavín de Huántar, and that the variability in style and images speaks of multiple overlapping interaction networks.
This presentation challenges the unspoken assumption—especially among the non-specialists—that the matter of Chavín cosmology is settled by proposing a way to 1) understand the Cupisnique-Chavín Religious Tradition that is coherent with the archaeological evidence, and 2) identify the Powerful Beings that once reigned in these territories. I will present cases from Coastal and Highland Peru and compare imagery from ceramics, stone sculpture, and architecture to demonstrate that these beings have always been here, in plain sight.
Hugo C. Ikehara-Tsukayama is the Harris Family Curator of the Arts of the Americas at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art-Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he was part of the curatorial team reinstalling the permanent collection of the Arts of the Ancient Americas (2021-2204) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). Trained as an anthropological archaeologist, Dr. Ikehara-Tsukayama was also Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile between 2018 and 2020. Currently, his scholarly research focuses on themes of predation, warriorhood, and ontology in ancient American art, with particular attention to Peru and Ecuador.
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