Olga de Amaral

Colombian, born 1932

BiographyColumbian artist Olga Ceballos’ Olga Ce was born in Santa Fe de Bogotá in 1932 and raised between Bogotá and the family’s farm in Cundinamarca during a particularly difficult time in Columbia’s history known as ‘La Violencia.' She received a diploma in architectural draftsmanship from Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in 1951 and that same year was named its director. In 1954, she arrived in the United States to study weaving at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a move that dramatically altered her life and career. At Cranbrook, de Amaral met her future husband, Jim Amaral. The two married in 1955 and returned to Colombia to start a textile workshop, Telas Amaral. She received her first solo exhibition in 1957 at the Sociedad Colombiana de Arcquitectos and the following year the famed American textile designer, Jack Lenor Larsen visited the de Amarals in Columbia. In 1966 she returned to the United States where she met Paul Smith, then director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City (now, Museum of Arts and Design), its founder Aileen Osborn Webb, and fiber artist Lenore Tawney - all critical players in the history of craft and fiber in the US. The following year de Amaral taught a textile workshop at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and Penland School of Art in North Carolina, cementing her presence in the United States as a key figure in the development of a burgeoning field of studio fiber art. The Museum of Contemporary Crafts hosted a one-person exhibition of her work in 1969. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 took her to Paris where she began experiments with gold application, a technique that would come to define her work. De Amaral is, in 2020, considered one of the most important fiber artists in both the United States and Latin America with works represented in numerous public collections around the world (see list below). A career retrospective is currently being planned. Curated by Laura Mott, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Design and Anna Walker, Assistant Curator, Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition is scheduled to open at Cranbrook in June 2022 and continue on to the MFA, Houston.

Select Public Collections:

American Craft Museum, NY

Art Institute of Chicago

Cleveland Museum of Art

Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum

Denver Art Museum

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, Columbia

Musee Cantonal des Beaus Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland

Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France

Museum of Modern Art, NY

National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan

Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art

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