Parra's poetry on canvas comes home.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Americas !Ojo!

AMONG THE EXTENSIVE array of projects orchestrated by the Chilean arts community to observe the thirtieth anniversary of the 1973 coup and commemorate the life of Salvador Allende, the socialist president who took his own life during events that toppled his government, one in particular had uncommon sentimental appeal. Although she died in 1967, three years before Allende became Latin America's first popularly elected Marxist-leaning president, Violeta Parra, Chile's most revered folklorist, had spent a lifetime championing through song and poetry the causes of her country's farm and industrial laborers and other marginalized peoples. Those issues had been Allende's calling as well. Far better known as a composer and singer, she had also late in life demonstrated her talent as a painter. A collection of over two dozen of Parra's oil paintings, exhibited in the courtyard of Santiago's municipalidad--town hall--drew a steady stream of those curious to see how the composer's passions so effortlessly expressed through song had been translated to canvas.

Parra was born in 1917 in the town of San Carlos in Chile's agricultural south. Her father, Nicanor, a teacher and noted folklorist, taught Violeta and her ten siblings how to sing and instilled in them the virtues of the region's hardworking campesinos. While a teenage schoolgirl in Santiago, she started singing profession ally with her sister, Hilda, as the duo Las Hermanas Parra. Her career in music gained momentum through the next three decades, her fame spread as she won local prizes in Chile, became a regular on national radiobroadcasts, began to record, and authored such songs as "Gracias a la vida." Parra became a leading exponent of Chile's fertile nueva cancion movement, a style that combined traditional balladry with poetic themes that addressed the plight of the dispossessed.

While living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the early 1960s, Parra dove headfirst into painting, seeking another...