Athena Quispe is a painter and poet dedicated to the cosmic endeavor of decentering modernism to privilege a Native American presence that has been displaced and regarded as “primitive art” since the beginning of colonialism during the fifteenth century. She uses long-established academic painting strategies formalized throughout Europe in order to address questions and issues around decolonizing the canon of Western art history and painting. Her stylistic choices are often credited to modernism or contemporary art, but they should be regarded as a continuation of the pre-conquest modes of representation by her Andean heritage.