For the better part of two decades, Irina Werning has traveled throughout Latin America searching for a specific trait: incredibly long hair. In her photography series Las Pelilargas—meaning “the long-haired ones” in Spanish—she chronicles a time-honored Indigenous tradition through a visual celebration of patience, joy, and cultural pride.
In a statement, Werning shares that when she asks young women in the many small towns she’s visited why they have long hair, they respond with simple reasons akin to, “Because I like it.” But, Werning adds, “The true reason is invisible and passes from generation to generation. It’s the culture of Latin America, where our ancestors believed that cutting hair was cutting life, that hair is the physical manifestation of our thoughts and our souls and our connection to the land.”
Nearly 90 images are included in Werning’s new book, Las Pelilargas, published by GOST Books. The photos span 18 years, starting with the artist’s first encounter with long-haired women in 2006 in Argentina, when she was photographing members of the Indigenous Kolla community.
“Guided by her intuition, she went on to spend months in remote mountain towns putting up signs in schools, hospitals, and markets, and organising hair competitions in an effort to seek out those with long hair,” GOST says. Werning continued to make the portraits until 2024. “She found that traditions were not just surviving, but evolving with long hair symbolising both continuity and subtle rebellion.”
The economy of Peru’s Sacred Valley has long been entwined with the seasons. Rural communities typically grow crops and raise livestock to sustain themselves and to barter with others, a process that necessitates an attunement with nature, its cycles, and how these patterns influence self-sufficiency.
This is particularly true for the Quechua communities, Indigenous peoples who have long worked for subsistence rather than state currencies. In recent years, health clinics, schools, markets, and transportation requiring residents to use cash have slowly eroded this way of life. Today, many Quechua men leave their communities to work in tourism, which offers an income and the opportunity to learn Spanish. Conversely, women often remain at home to care for children and farms, making them dependent on support from their partners and family members.
In 2009, the nonprofit Awamaki formed to aid communities around Ollantaytambo, Cusco, as they navigated this change. U.S.-based Kennedy Leavens and Miguel Galdo, of Peru, had worked together previously at a similar organization supporting 10 women weavers from Patacancha. When that project shuddered, the two decided to found Awamaki to maintain their support.
The nonprofit grew quickly, and today, it assists nine cooperatives, comprising 174 artisans and community members who work across craft and tourism. With collaboration at its core, Awamaki prides itself on sustainability and focuses on broadening its partners’ access to a diverse array of markets and economic opportunities.
In addition to financial changes, the climate crisis is rapidly transforming the ways of the Sacred Valley, which faces disproportionate impacts as glaciers melt and the water supply dwindles. “The shift towards having personal income, for our artisan partners, is not about replacing traditional livelihoods, but about widening the economic ground beneath them so they can move their families towards prosperity and build resiliency to the effects of climate change, all without leaving the community or traditional ways of life,” the nonprofit tells us.
Partnering with Awamaki allows cooperative members to focus on traditional spinning, dyeing, and weaving traditions, while the nonprofit offers structural support in selling their goods and coordinating tourism. Carving through the terrain north of Cusco, the Andean highlands were once home to the Incans and still hold traces of the ancient empire, like the historic city of Machu Picchu, which continues to attract around one million people from around the globe each year. For many years, the organization says, visitors would arrive in villages without prior notice, and the women would halt their work to meet tourists and hopefully, sell a piece.
And of course, this way of making is demanding, as women not only weave, but also raise alpacas, shear their wool, and spin and dye the soft fibers into yarn. “Before weaving, I have to wash my hands carefully so the wool doesn’t get damaged. It requires attention and care,” Ricardina, an Awamaki member from the Cusci Qoyllur cooperative, tells us. “Sometimes I can weave more, sometimes less. It depends on time, on my children, on everything else I have to do.”
Today, Awamaki helps to coordinate tourism and provide compensation for visits. This includes programs like Murmur Ring’s immersion, which will bring a group of creatives to the region this June. “Our role is to create opportunities that can be compatible with cultural continuity, if that is what communities themselves want,” they say, adding:
For women, without personal income, everyday decisions can feel distant. Paying for school supplies, buying medicine, covering transportation costs, buying food to supplement the limited traditional crops that grow at high altitude–all of these depend on uncertain flows of money and shifting household dynamics. As climate patterns grow more erratic, with harsher frosts, longer dry spells, and thinning pasture, even the agricultural base families rely on has become less predictable, deepening that sense of financial fragility.
This regular support has simultaneously buoyed many women to greater financial independence and helped retain their way of life. “When new artisans join a cooperative, they are typically mentored by other women in their own community. Cultural knowledge remains community-held and community-led,” the nonprofit shares.
“In my family, we make decisions together—about how to earn and how to move forward,” Daniela, a weaver from the Puskariy Tika cooperative, says. “Through this work, we are able to keep going and improve our lives little by little.”
Nadia, of the Rumia cooperative, echoes this sentiment. “Being part of Awamaki changed things for us. Now we have a steady income, and that allows us to keep weaving,” she says. “In our community, it’s not always easy. Some people say, ‘Why do you weave?’ But they don’t understand this work… We also teach our children to care for the environment, to grow things, to respect the land. That’s part of our work, too.”
To learn more about the women and support their work, visit Awamaki’s website.
Redolent of African basketry, hairstyles, headwear, and pottery, Donté K. Hayes’ abstract ceramic sculptures may be interpreted as poetic vessels, even though they lack traditional openings. While we easily associate clay pots and round woven forms with ideas related to storage, protection, and even spiritual significance, they also nod to the human head as a holder—a kind of receptacle for culture, language, personal expression, and dreams.
For the past several years, Hayes has approached porcelain with an emphasis on mostly monochrome black forms with meticulously hand-marked surfaces with textures that appear almost strand-like. Recently, he’s begun incorporating colored porcelain into the bulbous forms, inspired by African textiles like kente cloth and a kind of hat called ashetu, or prestige hats, worn by high-status Bamileke people of Cameroon. “The head is more than the center of the brain and thought; it is the place where the soul lives and must be protected,” the artist says.
“Embolden” (2025), colored porcelain, 7 x 9 x 9 inches
In addition to Indigenous adornment traditions of Western and Central Africa, Hayes often references his interest in hip-hop culture. “Sweater,” for example, nods to the late rap star Biggie Smalls—a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G.—and his penchant for wearing colorful knits, such as COOGI, a brand hugely popular in the 1980s and 1990s.
In addition to other vibrant new works, this piece “speaks to the African Diaspora’s freedom to be bold, unapologetic, and fully at ease in their own skin,” Hayes says. “Through experimenting with colored porcelain and by combining porcelain with mason stains to create distinct colored tones, like a DJ, I remix inherited materials into new forms, challenging ceramic hierarchies and cultural assumptions tied to color.”
Hayes’ motifs and forms draw from an array of sources, such as pottery made in Ghana and Burkina Faso, which often have ceremonial purposes. “Garner” takes these often bulbous, heavily textured vessels as a starting point, which Hayes also considers within the context of everyday use and popular culture.
“In ‘Garner,’ these traditional pottery forms visually evoked for me both bubble wrap—a material designed to safeguard fragile objects—and the Daleks from Doctor Who, a protagonist authoritarian race who destroy and exterminate other worlds and cultures through time and space,” Hayes says. “By merging these divergent ideas, I create a ‘future artifact’—a work that preserves ancestral knowledge and reclaims what was lost or erased due to the historic Atlantic slave trade and systemic racism, while also opening new possibilities for healing, care, and empowerment in the present and future.”
“Garner” (2025), ceramic, 13 x 16 x 16 inches
Hayes currently has work on view through February 18 in Ancestral Objects: Holders of Memory, Space and Time at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s UT Downtown Gallery. Forthcoming exhibitions this spring include his solo show, Ancestral Tomorrows, at the Sarah Moody Galley of Art at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, plus inclusion in the group exhibition Remix to Motown 45: Side A, Side B at The Carr Center in Detroit. Another solo show, Ancestral Remix at Peter Anthony Fine Art in Charleston, opens in April. Follow updates on Instagram.
“Prestige” (2025), colored porcelain, 7 x 8.5 x 8.5 inches“Caterpillar” (2024), ceramic 9.5 x 9.5 x 10 inches“Joy” (2025), colored porcelain, 6 x 9.5 x 7.5 inches“Conduit” (2025), colored porcelain, 12 x 8 x 9 inches“Balance” (2024), ceramic, 10.5 x 11 x 12 inches
From the beaded phrases of Jeffrey Gibson’s sculptural weavings to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s canoe series to Raven Halfmoon’s fingerprint-textured tributes, a new exhibition marks the largest presentation of American Indigenous work in the U.K. to date.
Opening next week, Hold to This Earth at Yorkshire Sculpture Park features nearly 70 pieces by 38 artists, which in turn represent 35 Tribal Nations. “(The artists) reference and honour ancestral knowledge whilst being steadfastly contemporary, asserting a powerful presence and countering narratives of erasure that too often position Indigenous cultures only in terms of the past,” says a statement from Tia Collection, from which the pieces are drawn.
Colossal readers will recognize works by Cannupa Hanska Luger, Dyani White Hawk, Nicholas Galanin, and more. The range of media highlights the diverse materials and approaches that Indigenous contemporary artists use and nods to cultural traditions, heritage crafts, and precious landscapes while also considering socio-economic issues, visibility and representation, and technology.
“Materials such as clay, hide, wool, beads, and natural pigments become carriers of powerful stories, memory, and tradition, rooted in connection to the earth,” says Tia Collection. “Newer modes of expression and understanding growing out of digital culture also speak to the shifting landscapes of Indigenous life in the 21st century.”
Hold to This Earth opens on June 13 and continues through April 18, 2027, in Wakefield. Keep up with exhibitions featuring works from the Tia Collection on Instagram.
Archaeologists have long known that the ancient peoples of North America—not unlike us—played a lot of games. Going back millennia, cultures around the world developed myriad ways to keep entertained, and for a long time, it was thought that the first dice ever used could be traced to the ancient Eastern European and Near East cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Caucasus. But according to a new paper by Robert Madden, published by Cambridge University Press, games of chance developed much, much earlier than originally thought—halfway around the world.
Researchers previously believed that the earliest dice originated about 5,500 years ago, but Madden shares that examples excavated in North America date back as far as the Late Pleistocene—the Ice Age. Among the oldest reported examples are a few found in modern-day Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The rich archaeological sites in these places are associated with the Folsom Culture, representing a dispersed hunter-gatherer lifeway that extended across the North American West, Southwest, and Great Plains around 12,000 years ago.
Examples of dice with details showing microscopic traces of pigment, with color enhanced for illustration
“The dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility,” Madden told Live Science. “It might have something to do with how separated these people are and the need to relate to people you don’t see very often.”
In the report, Madden also says that “the making and using of dice represent humans’ first known efforts to intentionally generate, observe, and record streams of controlled, random events…” He adds that, possibly for the first time, people were comprehending patterns or regularities in probability—a kind of precursor to understanding what we now call the law of large numbers. Anthropologists consider this to be “a crucial early step in humanity’s evolving discovery and understanding of randomness and the probabilistic nature of the universe.”
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