Love Through Resistance: The visual art practice of Lido Pimienta

Lido Pimienta is most commonly known and celebrated for her musical career, having made waves in the Canadian music scene with her Polaris prize-winning album La Papessa (2016)—for which she beat out heavy hitters like Leonard Cohen—and her latest Grammy-nominated album Miss Colombia (2020). In tandem with her role as a formidable Canadian music icon, Pimienta maintains a dedicated visual art practice. With a protean approach to medium, creating handmade clay jewellery and artists’ multiples, large-scale tapestries and soft sculptures, Pimienta honours her Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Wayuu heritage while simultaneously challenging the status quo. 

I was introduced to Lido Pimienta during the Halifax Pop Explosion controversy of 2017. Although Pimienta had been inviting women of colour, trans people, disabled people, and white women to come to the front of the stage at her concerts for years,​​¹ a confrontation with a white festival volunteer drew national media attention and subjected her to horrifc abuse. In a public statement, Pimienta clarifed that this generous gesture of making space for oppressed people is a tool to extend solidarity and an attempt to create “temporary equality.”​​² She concluded by reiterating her commitment to continuously “challenge a system that was built to put people like [her] down.”​​³ Pimienta’s veracity and resilience resonated with me deeply and I have followed her career ever since. 

Acts of resistance are woven throughout Pimienta’s creative practice. And much like her music, Pimienta’s visual art is defned by her experience as an outsider, both in her native Colombia and in Canada. Born in 1986 to an Afro-Colombian father and an Indigenous Wayuu mother, Lido Pimienta was raised in the coastal town of Barranquilla in Northern Colombia, where she faced discrimination as a child due to her African and Indigenous features.​​⁴ After her father passed away from cancer, Pimienta was raised by her maternal relatives who belong to the Wayuu ethnic group, a northern Indigenous people in Colombia and Venezuela. The Wayuu people are neglected by the state government and have a high mortality rate due to lack of access to clean water and nutritious food.​​⁵ Witnessing the violence both her Afro-Colombian and Wayuu communities faced by colonial systems in Colombia, Pimienta grew up resisting the government and being heavily involved in political activism.​​⁶ Pimienta and her mom sought refuge in Canada in 2005 due to growing political unrest in Colombia, only to be the target of further racially-motivated violence in her new home. After only two weeks in London, Ontario, Pimienta candidly recalls being told to “go back to her country”​​⁷ by a random man at a bus stop. These experiences of racism and marginalization have created, as she describes it, a “hyphenated existence” and a feeling of never being fully accepted anywhere.​​⁸ Pimienta has found solace in various forms of art, through which she celebrates the many layers of her identity. 

Pimienta graduated from one of Canada’s most esteemed art schools, OCAD University, seeking a career as an art critic and curator. However, the experience left her wary of institutions and art world hierarchies. Pimienta opened up about the abuse and policing she endured during her time at OCAD University in a 2020 Twitter thread.​​⁹ She became discouraged by the inaccessible environment fostered by less-than-helpful staff and was forced to switch her major due to the resource-hoarding by affuent white students. Ultimately, the hostility of art institutions, from the predatory fnancial burdens that come with a university degree to unpaid internships, compelled Pimienta to return to music as a way to earn money and to provide for her young son. 

In an effort to circumvent art institutions, Pimienta has maintained a visual art practice by utilizing digital spaces to showcase and disseminate her work, and she encourages other artists to do the same. In a 2018 speech on the future of the arts in Canada,​​¹⁰ delivered while cradling her newborn, Pimienta explained how the institutional education system serves more as a barrier than a door for people, like herself, who do not come from generational wealth. 

She proclaimed, “you don’t need [a degree] to become an artist. Just follow a good Instagram, and there is your lesson on aesthetics and beauty with a capital B.”​​¹¹ For years, Pimienta has been growing her visual art practice on her website, Art-stagram, and Tumblr and disseminating her handmade art objects, drawings, and merchandise at concert venues and art book fairs. Pimienta’s use of digital and in-person public spaces to share her art provides an accessible way to connect with her audience that refects her life as a touring musician, mother, and activist. 

Recently, Pimienta’s visual art practice has been embraced by the commercial art world and received more mainstream visibility. For her 2021 exhibition “Hanging by the Threads” at Toronto’s Patel Brown Gallery, Pimienta created a colourful vision of hope and love that celebrates her own matriarchal upbringing. The exhibition featured an immersive landscape of drawings, textiles, and soft sculptures inspired by memories of her childhood and her grandmother’s house. At the centre, like in all Wayuu homes, was the chinchorro: a hand-crafted hammock whose design features, specifcally its pattern and colours, tell a unique story.¹² Pimienta’s use of traditional textiles and fabrics honours her family’s lineage of skilled weavers who preserved Wayuu culture​​¹³ and, in doing so, is an act of resistance against colonial erasure. 

Pimienta doesn’t only celebrate women through their labour as mothers and caregivers; she also honours their unique identities and personalities. Hundreds of faces line the walls of “Hanging by the Threads.” Embroidered onto tapestries, painted with bright co-lours, and moulded into soft pillow-like sculptures, the faces are explicitly Indigenous and Black—portraying the familiar features of Pimienta’s friends and family. The mischievous and joyful expressions are amplifed with rich textures, thoughtful details, and decorations like tassels and Borlas Wayuu. In her art, femininity fnds freedom and is celebrated for its own virtue rather than in relation to any external desire. Female bodies and faces are not sexualized but rather are given autonomy, agency, and respect. 

Pimienta supports and empowers her community beyond their representation on gallery walls. Her digital platforms have created an opportunity for Pimienta to not only financially support herself but also foster mutual aid efforts. During the pandemic, Pimienta developed a fundraiser called “Portraits for Donations.”​​¹⁴ She raised money for vulnerable communities in Colombia during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by offering portraits for financial contributions. The initiative exceeded her goal of $25,000 and supplied groceries and other relief items to over 100 families. 

Whether she is performing on stage, painting on Instagram Live, or exhibiting at one of Canada’s leading commercial galleries, Pimienta uses every opportunity to support her community and uplift others facing marginalization. Her dedication to dismantling colonialism, racism, and sexism will continue to disrupt cultural institutions, and her growing popularity refects a universal hunger for change. 

Shahroze Khan is a writer, photographer, and creative based out of what is known as Canada. Outside writing and photography, Shahroze likes to sit outside on a warm day and drink a spiced chai latte while refecting on the absurdity of colonialism. 

1. Jessie Brown, “What Media Missed In Covering The ‘Overt Racism’ At Lido Pimienta’s Halifax Show,” CANADALAND, November 9, 2017, https://www.canadaland.com/what-media-missed-covering-lido-pimienta-racism/.
2. Lido Pimienta, “Public Statement,” Facebook, October 31, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/Lido.Pimienta.Musica/photos/a.461714333859890.109652.129371937094133/1738135292884448/?type=3&theater.
3. Pimienta, “Public Statement.”
4. Jasper Willems, “Lido Pimienta weighs resentment and love for Colombia,” Front, April 17, 2020, https://fr-nt.nl/en/2020/04/17/lido-pimienta-weegt-wrok-en-liefde-voor-colombia/.
5. Nicolò Filippo Rosso, Nick Miroff, and N. Kirkpatrick, “Forgotten in the dust of northern Colombia,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2017/08/07/forgotten-in-the-dust-of-northern-colombia/.
6. Katie Beswick, “From Colombia to Canada, everything Lido Pimienta does ends up being a political statement,“ Loud and Quiet, December 22, 2017, https://www.loudandquiet.com/interview/columbia-canada-everything-lido-pimienta-ends-political-statement/.
7. “London is very racist.”
8. Greg Kot, “Lido Pimienta — a misft fnds a home on stage,” Chicago Tribune, January 11, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ott-lido-pimienta-0112-story.html.
9. Lido Pimienta, Twitter, July 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/LidoPimienta/status/1280920271071973376.
10. Lido Pimienta, “Lido Pimienta on Art’s Matriarchal Future,” The Walrus, November 29, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBZNTaEcu-8&t=69s.
11. Pimienta, “Art’s Matriarchal Future.”
12. https://wayuuhammocks.com/wayuu-people-handwoven-hammocks/.
13. Max Mertens, “On the discipline and patience it takes to make creative work: Interview with Lido Pimienta,” The Creative Independent, June 2, 2020, https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-and-artist-lidopimienta-on-the-discipline-and-patience-it-takes-to-make-creative-work/.
14. Lido Pimienta, Twitter, November 4, 2020, https://twitter.com/LidoPimienta/status/1323975799360409600.

This article is published in issue 39.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue