athena quispe is a Peruvian-American multidisciplinary artist and romantic poet dedicated to the cosmic endeavor of softening and distorting symbolic ideas and materials to create poetic installations and synesthetic environments that increase psychic and soul redemption. For example, she installs green filters to radicalize the institutional setting, creating a magenta afterimage to alter cognitive processes that soothe the eye and our emotions. Furthermore, she distills scents to create incense, works with natural pigments, ancestral human blood, metallurgy, pyrography, fire, printmaking, and pulverizes healing crystals to summon a power that mends the spiritual imbalance between humans and the objects of art and art-making. athena uses long-established academic painting strategies formalized throughout Europe in order to address questions and issues around decentering the canon of Western Art history and painting. However, her art and creative style is a continuation and transmutation of her Andean heritage and that of the autochthonous ‘Americas’—a precolonial aesthetic, sacred tradition and invention often and wrongly accredited to European art (i.e., Modernism, surrealism, AbEx., etc).