Cristina Flores Pescorán

Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts

Article

No. 38 • August 2025

For generations, the story of art has been told through a singular lens. When the first editions of canonical texts like Janson’s History of Art and Gombrich’s The Story of Art were published, they featured zero women artists. The Pretty Brilliant: Women in the Arts series aims to make whole what has long been a one-sided story. In these issues, featuring 583 artists, we celebrate women who have always been creating, innovating, and inspiring, like Cristina Flores Pescorán.

Cristina Flores Pescorán, Mama Protectora: Que respire la herida, 2021, performance with textile work, woven in cotton and sheep wool dyed with cochineal |© Cristina Flores Pescoran, photo: Isidro Lambarri

Fig 1. Cristina Flores Pescorán, Mama Protectora: Que respire la herida, 2021, performance with textile work, woven in cotton and sheep wool dyed with cochineal | © Cristina Flores Pescoran, photo: Isidro Lambarri

text: Rosa Kooijmans

Cristina Flores Pescorán (Peru, b. 1986) was introduced to textile techniques at a young age by the women in her family and the Spanish nuns at her Catholic school. While she enjoyed learning these crafts, she also became aware that her education promoted a narrow view of what it meant to be a woman. It was only after her studies, when she began working with female textile masters, that she embraced weaving as a form of personal and collective restoration – a way to reconnect with the women in her family. For Pescorán, weaving is not just a material practice: ‘There is a whole set of processes and relationships that occur with it. It resonates and speaks just as one’s own voice does.’

Her own experience with skin cancer, and the long medical journey that followed, led her to explore the meaning of healing. Drawing from pre-Incan Chancay gauzes – openwork textiles believed to hold protective and healing powers – she reflects on the body, illness, and recovery. In Mama Protectora: Let the wound breathe (2021), Pescorán reimagines the origin story of the Peruvian flag: a goddess appears on Earth to tend to the wounds of the people. As the gauze of Mama Protectora touches the bleeding land, it absorbs the blood and turns red.

Pescorán’s practice extends beyond textiles into drawing, performance, video, and photography – an exploration of what it means to make a wound visible, and how it might be healed.

Cristina Flores Pescorán is featured in See All This #38: Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts vol. III. Order a copy here.