This exhibition is the result of an ongoing collaboration between the Casa del Alabado Pre-Columbian Art Museum and the Monastery of Santa Clara in Quito, which have been neighbors in the Historic Center for more than four hundred years. This project marks the museum’s 15th anniversary and seeks to highlight the history, memory, and cultural legacy of one of the city’s oldest monastic communities, offering a fresh perspective on its historical and religious heritage.
“An Inner Journey: Treasures of the Monastery of Santa Clara in Quito” is a historical exhibition that reveals, for the first time to the public, an exceptional collection of artistic, documentary, and spiritual artifacts preserved for more than four centuries within the cloister. Founded in 1596, the Monastery of Santa Clara has been a place of contemplative life, creativity, and memory. The exhibition offers an in-depth exploration of the history and inner world of women’s monastic life, examining spirituality, daily work, and the forms of artistic expression developed within the cloister. Through founding documents, unpublished manuscripts, works of art, liturgical textiles, and music composed within the monastery itself in the early 18th century, the exhibition highlights a heritage that has long been safeguarded.
The curation and research were led by Lucía Durán, executive director of the Casa del Alabado Pre-Columbian Art Museum, together with the sisters of the monastery and the museum’s interdisciplinary team. The curatorial narrative proposes a journey that begins at the monastery’s historical threshold, passing through its soundscape, photography, and six galleries dedicated to history, the inner world, liturgical embroidery, wheat and barley assemblages, and colonial art from Quito. The tour highlights how, within the seclusion of monastic life, a form of creation emerged in which spirituality, materiality, and time intertwine.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION ROOMS:
PHOTOGRAPHY
The exhibition begins with a photographic journey through the inner life of the monastery, the daily routine, the monastic offices, and spiritual life.
HISTORY
The early history of the Monastery of Santa Clara was recorded in the Libro Verde, a chronicle begun after its founding in 1596 by Doña Francisca de la Cueva, and in the three handwritten volumes of “La Perla Mystica”, by Sister Gertrudis de San Ildefonso and Friar Martín de la Cruz (1700–1718). The resonance of the “Litany to the Virgin of Amparo,” contained in the third volume, in dialogue with religious texts, sculptures, and paintings from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, bears witness to a feminine tradition of profound contemplative, intellectual, and aesthetic depth, which left an enduring legacy in the history of Quito.
INNER WORLD
The religious vocation marks the transition to a new way of inhabiting the world, in which previous ties are transformed into spiritual and communal commitments. The spiritual order and daily organization of monastic life are reflected in election and office documents, internal records, letters, diaries, and devotional objects; in turn, dowries, gifts, financial ledgers, and censuses demonstrate the ways in which the Poor Clare community maintained an active presence in the social and economic life of Quito for centuries.
TEXTILES
The language of liturgical textiles encapsulates the symbolism and rituality of the Christian tradition. Silks, velvets, sequins, gold and silver threads, and gemstones were incorporated into the creation of chasubles, dalmatics, and stoles, as well as corporals, canopies, and pallia intended for the altar. In these pieces created in the cloister, Franciscan and Baroque iconography converge with techniques characteristic of Andean embroidery. Reliefs, appliqués, and intense color contrasts bring together global knowledge and local traditions in a single expression of faith.
TEXTILE WORKS
Wheat and barley, cultivated in the monastery’s gardens and estates from the 17th to the 20th century, were part of an economy in which agricultural labor was integrated into the daily and spiritual order of the cloister, giving rise to a unique textile tradition rooted in Andean customs. The plant fibers were carefully processed, dyed, and woven, resulting in altar frontals and canopies used in liturgical rites. Other pieces, such as the pulpitesa, incorporated embroidery in brilliant colors and appliqué work on gauze. In all of them, the slow and silent rhythm of the creative process of the Poor Clares of Quito is palpable.
SALVE REGINA
The final room of the tour invites us to immerse ourselves in the sounds of the monastery through the musical scores of “La Perla Mystica” and to appreciate the beauty of Quito’s colonial art.
With this exhibition, the Casa del Alabado Pre-Columbian Art Museum reinforces its commitment to the community and the city, as well as its work with the San Roque neighborhood and the Plaza de Santa Clara in Quito, alongside the residents with whom it has collaborated for more than fifteen years. El Alabado has established itself as a museum with its doors open to the community, a vital cultural space for the city, and an international benchmark that safeguards 8000 years of heritage, in dialogue with other tangible and intangible heritage sites in Ecuador.
CREDITS
“An Inner Journey” is a project of the Casa del Alabado Pre-Columbian Art Museum in collaboration with the Monastery of Santa Clara in Quito.
Curator and Research: Lucía Durán, Executive Director of the Casa del Alabado Museum.
In collaboration with: the sisters of the Monastery of Santa Clara, María Belén Misle, María Elena Espinoza, Estefanía Carrera, Jazmín Buitrón, Segundo Caiza, Saralhue Acevedo, Lorena Calahorrano, Estefanía Cardona, and Emerson Mena.
Exhibition design: Seppia
HOW TO VISIT THE EXHIBITION?
The exhibition can only be visited by making a reservation or by emailing educacion@alabado.org
Booking
GUIDED TOURS
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays
10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.
Capacity: 14 people | Duration: 45 min
USD 8
Meeting point: Casa del Alabado Museum
Calle Cuenca N1-41, Historic Center of Quito
Tickets can be purchased at the museum
