Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

This landmark presentation marks the first U.S. solo museum exhibition for Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (b. 1971, Sheroana, Venezuela), one of Venezuela’s most important contemporary artists. The exhibition features over 100 works across three decades, and demonstrates the artist’s extraordinary range: Hakihiiwe is best known for delicate drawings and prints on handmade paper, but his practice has come to include painting, photography, animation, site-specific murals and installation. His work draws inspiration from the forested world around him – flora, fauna, and organic forms – and deploys his distinct visual language to explore ancestral myths, oral histories, and the environment. Hakihiiwe enlarges our view of the world by inviting us to view it through Yanomami cosmological and conceptual perspectives.

A member of the Yanomami people, among the largest Indigenous groups in the Amazonian rainforest, Hakihiiwe was raised and lives in the remote Poripori community along the banks of the upper Orinoco River. He began his artistic practice in the early 1990s, when Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata introduced him to papermaking with natural fibers. “Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe” opens with the artist’s earliest works, and goes on to trace his development as he records animal tracks in the forest and uses these markings to create complex compositions. Landscape will become another key subject; Hakihiiwe’s paintings convey the relationships between animals and plants that bring the Amazon to life.

The exhibition further highlights works created after a pivotal moment in Hakihiiwe’s life, his initiation into shamanic practice. “Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe” features a new site-specific mural on a monumental and unprecedented scale, and a site-specific installation that explores the use of shamanic materials. It presents for the first time in an institutional context books from Hakihiiwe’s monumental Yanomami Encyclopedia, an ongoing project through which the artist, in consultation with other shamans, gathers Yanomami knowledge. A new film, Hekura peni ware puhi aupouhe (The Spirits Wash My Face, 2026), animates his drawings to tell the story of his connection to spirits through dreams. A new series of large-scale works, created in May 2026 during a residency at Taller Arte Dos Gráfico (Subachoque, Colombia), and supported by the Fondation Cartier, explores the dream world that has emerged from shamanic training. These works are accompanied by Agua de Espíritu, a short documentary by Juanita Onzaga commissioned by the Fondation Cartier. Guided by Hakihiiwe’s voice and dreams, the film offers an intimate view of his spiritual world.

The exhibition was designed by Mexico City-based architecture studio Taller de Arquitectura, led by Mauricio Rocha Iturbide. The installation transforms filtered light, natural pigments and earth, with inspiration from the traditional Yanomami housing (the shapono),

Hakihiiwe (b. 1971, Sheroana, Venezuela; lives in Platanal, Upper Orinoco region , Venezuela) has participated in the Sydney Biennial (2022) and Venice Biennale (2022). He has had one- and two-person exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2025, with Laura Anderson Barbata); the Museu de arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), São Paulo, Brazil (2023) and the Lissabon Kunsthalle in Lisbon, Portugal (2021). His work is held in the collections of Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France; Museo de Arte de Lima, Perú; Museo de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia; British Museum, London, UK; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Denver Art Museum; Colorado, US; Guggenheim Museum, New York, US; and Kadist Foundation, among many others.

“Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe” is organized by ICA Miami and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The exhibition is co-curated by Gean Moreno, ICA Miami’s Monica and Blake Grossman Director of the Art +Research Center, and Michela Alessandrini, Curator, Fondation Cartier.