Exhibition
April 18 – June 5, 2026
Al Held Foundation
Boiceville, NY
Koyoltzintli:
How to Play a Broken Bone
Koyoltzintli, Chakapa. Pen and color pencil on paper. 11 x 14 inches.
River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to inaugurate our 2026 season with Koyoltzintli's solo exhibition, How to Play a Broken Bone. Curated by Jess Wilcox and staged in Al Held’s former drawing studio, the artist's newest body of work emerges from an investigation into a small, three-inch Chancay flute.
Dating to the Chancay civilization (ca. 1000–1470 AD) of the coastal region of present-day Peru, the bird bone flute bears incised circular markings that the artist speculates may function as a musical score, a constellation chart, or a diagram for ritual practice. Procured from a private collector, the instrument had not been played in decades. When the artist breathed sound into it, a crack appeared.
The exhibition features three large-scale drawings that reference the flute's ornamentation and its relationship to celestial mapping: one depicts the markings of the front, another highlights a constellation from the back, and a third translates the artist’s vocal response to the instrument’s sound into line. Embracing the accidental crack, Koyoltzintli introduces an arc (or broken circle) symbol into her newly composed score. In the resulting sound work, she inserts a recording of the world’s oldest living bird, an Albatross, aptly named Wisdom, to produce an interspecies duet. Through this layered system, the work entangles past and present, bird and human, instrument and breath, life and death.
In conjunction with the works on paper, the artist is presenting a series of large ceramic whistling vessels. Developed through extensive research into Pre-Columbian sound systems, these multi-chambered vessels are designed to produce a range of low and high tones. Their forms, textured with materials such as coconut oil, beeswax and mica, resemble plant life symbolic of the foundational building blocks of our ecosystem.
Alongside the instrumental forms, the series titled Sound Studies—drawings that visualize instruments performed at specific sites under distinct temporal, lunar, and weather conditions—will also be presented. Koyotlzintli will perform with the water whistles in a brief activation on Friday, June 5, 2026.