Archive of Drawings, Notebooks, Correspondence, Exhibition Photographs, and Instructional Materials by a Chilean Embroidery Artist and Educator.

This archive documents the career of Carmen Benavente de Orrego-Salas, an artist and educator who used textile arts as a powerful tool for community development and women’s economic independence in rural villages in Chile and the southwest US. 

Inspired by her childhood memories of Santiago and her nurse's embroideries, Benavente decided to learn crewelwork after moving to the US with her musicologist husband in 1961. Her experimentation with color and design (as evidenced in the archive) quickly brought her to a high skill level and a desire to educate others. She began teaching in the US and when she returned to Chile in 1971, during the political upheaval of the Salvador Allende era, she offered to teach the non-native art of wool embroidery to the women of her hometown village, Ninhue. The archive documents aspects of her teaching to these mostly indigenous students. From the beginning she understood the project as both a means for economic independence and a form of creative expression. Crucially she limited her classes to the techniques of wool embroidery and natural dyeing, encouraging the women to develop their own local iconography based on traditional symbology. Still active today, the Ninhue group is especially interesting in relation to the celebrated work of the Chilean arpilleristas which emerged around the same time, also offering income and collective support for women, specifically for those affected by the oppression of the Pinochet dictatorship. While the arpilleras were acts of resistance, both the Ninhue textiles and those of the arpilleras exist as the testimonies of otherwise invisible experiences, preserving memory and identity in a time of erasure and violence.

The second major project documented in the archive is a series of embroidery workshops Benavente led in Northern New Mexico from 1973-74 under the auspices of the International Folk Art Museum of Santa Fe. These classes with local Hispanic women led to an exhibition of their works and the creation of the landmark Villanueva Tapestry, a 265-foot long embroidered tapestry created for the small village church, Our Lady of Guadalupe. The work translates both oral histories of the area and historical research about its colonial settlement by the Spanish into a truly monumental piece of folk art whose scale and ambition have been compared to the Bayeux Tapestry in France.  

Benavente’s archive is a unique primary source for scholars of folk art, women's work, Hispano-American studies, and transnationalism.

The archive is contained in one standard banker’s box and consists of: a binder with Benavente’s personal scrapbook pages of press and exhibition materials related to Villanueva; a substantial folder of Villanueva correspondence; a ring binder, two thick manilla envelopes, and a red folder all with various stitchery designs and drawings, and wool and fabric samples; an unlined black notebook with drawings and textile ideas; a ring binder with photographic reproductions of the works chosen for the Embroiderers of Ninhue, including many examples not reproduced in the book; a fine copy of Embroiderers of Ninhue; a personal book handwritten by Carmen for her husband Juan; and a typed manuscript of a friend’s day book.