The Visionary PRAXIS of Violeta Parra: Music, Poetry, and Art

This book examines Chilean singer-songwriter, visual artist, poet and ethnographer Violeta Parra (1917-1967). Parra perceived her multiple outputs to be unified and continuous with her own self, demonstrating unequalled artistic agency in a hybrid creative space that she personally constructed and embraced via her poetry, music, and her visual art.

The Visionary Praxis of Violeta Parra: Music, Poetry, and Art analyzes the hybrid artistic space of Chilean icon Violeta Parra (1917-1967). Lorna Dillon and Patricia Vilches examine the forces, connections, disruptions, and juxtapositions in the music that Parra compiled and composed; the art that she generated, and the poetry that she produced. The authors explore Parra’s profound desire to preserve and retain cultural tradition even as she blended, transformed, and embraced notions of modernity and the avant-garde.Parra was shaped by Ñuble, the region where she was born, and she absorbed the cultural diversity of Chile’s Central Valley. The vicissitudes and changes of her life inform her artistic creations in foundational ways. The authors explore how Parra’s artistic production matured during periods of relentless and sustained creative activity and intense effort which she viewed as continuous with, and inseparable from, her own representation of self.

Lorna Dillion is Assistant Professor in Art History at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Patricia Vilches is Professor of Spanish and Italian at Lawrence University and Visiting Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.