Ana Pellicer (March 2, 1946) born Ana Emilia Pellicer López de Llergo, is a Mexican sculpture, jewelry maker, artisan, and forest conservationist. Ana has spent most of her life helping the community of Santa Clara del Cobre, Mexico. She has spent her years there experimenting with amate paper, wood, and copper.
Biography
Ana Pellicer was born in Mexico City on March 2, 1946. She has two sisters, Pina Pellicer and Pilar Pellicer, both being famous Mexican actresses. Her parents were Pilar Lopez Llergo and Cesar Pellicer Sanchez. She met her sculpture husband at Santa Clara del Cobre, Mexico, James Metcalf who died in 2012 at age of 86. She has won multiple awards and has even established an art school named the Adolfo Best Maugard School of Arts and Crafts (Escuela de Artes y Oficios Adolfo Best Maugard) with her husband which taught the traditional coppersmith techniques.
She also helped establish a source of income for the women in Santa Clara by teaching them to make jewelry and how to sell it. She now spends the last of her days reviving a forest in Santa Clara to help with the environment but also for artisans to continue with traditional coppersmith techniques by using the branches from these trees to produce coal, a necessary element for the process of smelting copper.
Education
Ana Pellicer got a Psychology Degree at the University of Iberoamericana, Mexico City. She then moved to New York soon after where she fell in love with the art museums and then decided to go back to school and pursue art where she learned to be a sculptor and where she studied plastic arts. She got a degree from The New School for Social Research and The Art Students League in New York. She then returned to Mexico in 1967 and took engraving courses, where she had her first interaction with copper. Shortly after, she moves to Santa Clara del Cobre to study with James Metcalf, who had already established a workshop with other local artisans using traditional coppersmith techniques.
Work in Santa Clara del Cobre
Once in Santa Clara del Cobre, Ana Pellicer learned the traditional technique of coppersmith and was the only women in these workshops that worked with skilled men artisans. She worked alongside her soon to be husband and together created works that helped the community for years to come.
In 1968, the coppersmith artisans had the opportunity to create the cauldron for the Olympics which was being held in Mexico. This commission gave the work of Santa Clara del Cobre attention and respect for the traditional coppersmith technique.
La Maquina Enamorada (The Machine in Love) 1975, is a sculpture piece that was commissioned by Francisco Trouyet. This piece was the largest work that they had produced and it was also the first one that was presented in the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City. Ana worked on this project with the other artisans from Santa Clara, and with this project she eventually earned the respect from the other coppersmiths.
After earning the respect of the male artisans, Ana takes on a new challenge of helping the women of Santa Clara by teaching them how to make copper jewelry. This caused a lot of feuds with the men from the town, but eventually they came around and respected the new source of income. The women from Santa Clara started selling the jewelry and started winning competitions in the local fairs. The school established by Pellicer and Metcalf is where the jewelry program started and eventually the school was revolved around this craft. They added a day care center to the school, so now single mothers had a place for their children to be taken care of as they learned how to make jewelry.
She continues to live in Santa Clara del Cobre, a town that she adopted as hers. She has been restoring the forest in hopes to bring better air and a better environment for the town; she planted trees that are now over 8 years old. The branches from these trees are used to create coal, a material needed to continue the traditional coppersmith techniques.
Solo exhibitions
Poemas Forjados (Hand-wrought Poems) Exhibition
Poemas Forjados is an exhibition that took place on March 27, 2010 at the Palacio Clavijero in Morelia. Ana displays different themes in this work, she speaks of women empowerment, self-identity, and Mexican culture. There is a total of 75 sculptures in this exhibition with 6 different themes which are: Secretos, Mujer, Luz, Poder, Libertad, and Juego. A couple of works shown in this exhibition are La libertad de Ocumicho (1990) and La libertad Purepecha (1987).