Pipicha by Cinthya Santos Briones
Starting Price: $800
Cinthya Santos Briones
Pipicha, 2024
8 x 10 in.
Hand-embroidered cyanotype on cotton fabric, made with pipicha seeds and dried leaves (a native Mexican herb)
About the Work
Migrant Herbalism is an artistic and community-based research project that explores medicinal herbs which, together with communities from Mexico and Abya Yala, have migrated to New York City. The project examines how plants, traditional medicine, and ancestral knowledge cross borders, adapt to new territories, and remain alive both in memory and in everyday practice. Visually, the work draws on historical camera-less photography processes, oral history, and textile narratives. The series is composed of hand-embroidered cyanotypes on cotton and lumen prints made on velvet infused with herbs, bark, seeds, and minerals collected from shops and botanicas in New York City’s Latino neighborhoods. Each piece functions as a solar imprint: luminous traces that preserve and interpret vegetal elements—flowers, petals, pollen, branches, leaves, and roots—arranged individually or in small bundles, like offerings. The embroidery incorporates traditional Mexican figures and patterns passed down by our grandmothers, seeking to capture the spirit of the plants and their healing power, thus forming a visual and tactile archive of the diaspora.
About the Artist
Cinthya Santos Briones is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar of Nahua Indigenous heritage based in New York. Trained in Anthropology and Ethnohistory, she spent a decade as a researcher at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), focusing on Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine. Her practice integrates ethnography, historiography, and socially engaged art to explore the historical and social dimensions of migration. Working across photography, archival materials, writing, drawing, collage, textiles, and popular education, she creates nonlinear narratives that amplify community voices and cultivate collective storytelling.
Santos Briones exhibited in Building Radical Soil in 2022 at The Latinx Project.
http://www.cinthya-santosbriones.com/