When Julio Cachiguango paints, he doesn’t begin with a plan. He begins with an animal, maybe, or a portrait, and then the canvas takes over.
“I never have a plan,” Cachiguango said. “When I’m painting, it’s showing me how is the painting going to be. The painting tells me how is going to be … My mind takes me, like it has to be a story.”
That story usually leads home: to Otavalo, the Quichua town in northern Ecuador where Cachiguango grew up in the shadow of Imbabura, the volcano whose silhouette anchors much of his work. This month, that story is on the walls of Art House 360, the new multicultural arts center in downtown Verona, where Cachiguango is artist-in-residence for the month of April. The residency includes two workshops focused on painting horses and an exhibition which includes the roughly 10 new pieces he’s created during the residency.
Cachiguango, who has lived in the Madison area for 23 years, came to Wisconsin almost by accident. He had just finished his fine arts degree at a state university in Quito when a brother-in-law, a touring musician who spent summers in Madison with an Andean band, convinced him to try his luck in the United States.
“I got the visa and everything. It was like suddenly, not planned,” he said.
Visual art, though, had never been an accident. “Since I was a child, I used to draw a lot,” Cachiguango said. “I used to play like I was a soccer player, but I was drawing matches.”
His older sister, who briefly attended the art school in Quito, was the first to recognize that her brother’s attention belonged somewhere other than math class. She told him about a high school of the arts attached to the university. He enrolled, and never really stopped.
Between high school and university, Cachiguango spent two years in Europe based in Breda, in the south of the Netherlands, and traveling to Germany and Denmark, playing music with other Indigenous Ecuadorian musicians in a tradition that sent Andean street bands across the continent in the 1990s. But the European masters didn’t shape his eye. He cites only Michelangelo as an influence, and even then, sparingly, more for range than for the style.
His true reference point is Cusco-school painter Manuel Chili, known as Caspicara, the 18th-century Quichua sculptor of colonial Quito. “In Ecuador, they teach us European art, mostly. There is not like Indigenous art, so you don’t have a reference about Indigenous artists,” Cachiguango said. “Caspicara is an artist from the colonial time, when (the) Spanish came. That is one of the only Indigenous artists I have referenced.”
The Otavalo Quichua are one of Ecuador’s most distinct Indigenous communities, known internationally for their weaving traditions, their long braided hair, and their embroidered blouses and ponchos. Cachiguango said four Otavalo Quichua families currently live in the Madison area, with a larger community of Saraguro Quichua from southern Ecuador, and another cluster of Quichua dairy farmers up around Hudson and Appleton. The families gather for Inti Raymi, the Andean solstice celebration, traveling between cities to keep the ceremonies going.
That cultural specificity is what Art House 360 co-founder Karisa Johnson said makes Cachiguango an ideal first resident under a new partnership with Visit Verona tourism. The art house’s mission, she said, is “greater wellness through creativity for all,” and the “360” stands for multicultural, multigenerational and multidisciplinary.
“It’s amazing to me that your work embodies all of these things,” Johnson told Cachiguango. At his recent opening reception, his band Wisconsin Michikuna played, he sang, and guests began an Indigenous dance in the gallery. “We moved the furniture out so there could be more people and more dancing,” Johnson said. “That is really the purpose of the house.”
Cachiguango’s residency has produced about 10 new paintings, and he also painted a mural around the Art House’s front door before it opened last year. The residency will also include two workshops focused on painting horses — one for kids, one for adults — both built around painting horses. “I think people any age can identify with a horse,” he said. The April 16 class for adults is full; a few spots are still open for the children’s workship on April 19. Registration is available here.
Cachiguango hopes to stay involved at Art House 360 after the residency ends. He lives only 10 minutes away.
“It will be very, very helpful for this area,” Cachiguango said of the space. “Every time it’s growing. It’s going to be something unique that everybody should come and start doing a project here.”
