Hi everyone! I know I’m a little bit behind on blog posts but you’ll have to forgive me, I’ve been so busy between my excursion last weekend to El Carmen (an Afro-Peruvian village, which I’ll be posting about as soon as this post is complete) as well as finishing up the semester here! There’s been a lot happening but so little time to actually sit down and blog about it. I’m going to keep this post short so that I can devote more time to a longer post following this one to talk about my weekend excursion to El Carmen in the Chincha province of Perú.
As you may remember from a previous post of mine about my visit to MALI (Museo de Arte de Lima), I mentioned the Museo Larco as another site I was hoping to visit before leaving Perú this semester. I was lucky enough to be able to go and visit this museum last Thursday along with my IFSA-Butler Advanced Writing and Peruvian Culture class.
To give a brief explanation and some background (before I post up some pictures below), the Museo Larco (Larco Museum) is a beautiful privately owned museum full of pre-Columbian art. It is located in the Pueblo Libre district of Lima and is about a 5-minute walk from the university that I’m attending this semester. This made it a very easy and convenient trip to do during the school day with our entire class. The museum contains a variety of galleries that display Peruvian pre-Columbian history and one section of the museum that caught everyone’s eye was the pre-Columbian erotic pottery gallery. The pre-Columbian erotic pottery gallery is really quite fascinating in that it showcases the many objects that Rafael Larco found while he was doing research on sexual representations in Peruvian art.
The museum also has many permanent exhibitions. One of these permanent collections has ancient Peruvian textiles while another contains the jewelry that was used by rulers in pre-Columbian Perú. The ceramics on display show how the Peruvian cultures used certain archaeological objects to represent their own daily lives. It’s pretty amazing how all of the objects that have been preserved at the museum contain so much history!
Overall, this museum visit was totally worth it and I would give it a 10/10 (definitely recommend).
Here are some photos from the different galleries in the museum:
Museo Larco from outside
Inside the permanent collections gallery
pre-Columbian erotic art gallery (sexual representations in Peruvian art)
