Readorama: Artist Liliana Wilson focuses on Chile’s ‘disappeared’
Readorama: Artist Liliana Wilson focuses on Chile’s ‘disappeared’
By BRIAN BURNES -
The Kansas City Star
12/19/2014 6:00 AM
| Updated: 12/20/2014 8:59 PM
Sometime after 1973, Liliana Wilson learned that the bodies of two men had washed up on a nearby beach.
She went down and looked. Although she didn’t know them, she and others considered them to be two of the “disappeared.” Those were the estimated 3,000 dissidents who went missing during the regime of Augusto Pinochet, who’d ruled Chile since a 1973 military coup.
Just what happened to them and who was responsible remains a source of emotional debate and turmoil in Chile.
In 1977, Wilson rendered a version the two men in “Los Desaparecidos en el Cielo,” or “The Disappeared in Heaven,” a color pencil drawing whose graceful, surreal lines stand in stark juxtaposition to the brutality referenced by its title.
That’s one quality of Wilson’s work that remains compelling, said Norma E. Cantú, who has edited a new volume of essays describing Wilson’s work.
“She paints these two bodies and they look so peaceful, as if they are asleep on the beach,” said Cantú, professor of Latina/Latino Studies and English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
“It is a beautiful image, but anyone knowing the history will see that title and immediately will be brought back to that time.”
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