ABSTRACT
This article examines the racial politics of ornament in the pattern books, prints, and haute-couture scarves made by the Peruvian designer Elena Izcue in the 1920s and 1930s. In both Paris and Peru, she gained recognition for a unique visual style which adapted ancient Nazca, Paracas, and Chavín motifs to the abstract grammar of Parisian modernist design. Situated at the convergence of European modernist primitivism and Peruvian indigenism, Izcue’s work highlights the complexity of understanding race at the threshold of multiple geographies. Moreover, her use of ornament was associated with gendered and raced assumptions that are themselves worthy of analysis. I argue here that Izcue’s use of ornament articulated her ambivalent identification with indigeneity: ultimately, her ornamental creations reveal her complex position as a member of the racially privileged elite in Peru who nevertheless found herself primitivized within the more global geography of modernism.
