ABOUT THE EXHIBITION CURATOR

Dr. Peter T. Furst, curator of Mythic Visions, is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the State University of New York at Albany and a Research Associate in the American Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. He received his doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1966. His initial ethnographic fieldwork took him to the Warao country in the Orinoco Delta of Venezuela.

For nearly four decades, Dr. Furst has been active in research and publication on the Huichol peoples. From 1965 to 1971, he worked closely with the well-known Huichol shaman-artist Ramón Medina Silva, who pioneered the narrative yarn painting. In 1968, Dr. Furst was curator of the world’s first exhibition of Huichol yarn paintings. Drawn from a collection of Ramón Medina’s artwork at UCLA, the exhibition was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. More recently, in 1996, the University of New Mexico Press published People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival, which Dr. Furst co-edited and to which he contributed the opening chapter.

Elected a Foreign Fellow by the prestigious Linnean Society of London for his work on sacred plants, including the peyote cactus, which the Huichol hold to be divine, Dr. Furst is the author or co-author of more than 150 published papers and books.