Mari Lyn Salvador

Mari Lyn Salvador (born 1943) is a well known scholar of Panamanian textiles called molas, appliqued panels attached to the front and back of traditional blouses worn by Kuna women of Panama. Her study of these textiles and the people who create them has been the foundation for a career in museums that has recently culminated in the directorship at the San Diego Museum of Man. Salvador's career has been focused on analysis of ethnoaesthetics, appreciation of art in its own cultural context, from a variety of peoples.

She started college as a student of art, particularly weaving and pottery, at San Francisco State University. Immediately following, she joined the Peace Corps in 1966, and was sent to Panama to help build chicken coops. Building chicken coops according to established rules didn’t agree with her artistic sensibilities, so her supervisors at the Peace Corps allowed her to start an artists’ cooperative among the Kuna, near Panama’s Colombian border. While living with the Kuna, she developed an appreciation for their brightly colored molas. Mola Coop Panama, as it is now known, is still active in that region of Panama. It has been a strong influence on the local economy and is currently developing an international presence through use of the internet.

As a graduate student, Dr. Salvador gathered a reference collection of molas that formed the backbone of the exhibit for the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, for which "The Art of Being Kuna: Layers of Meaning Among the Kuna of Panama" (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997) was compiled. She has since traveled widely researching them, including visits to the National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of the American Indian, and the largest collection in the world at the Goteborgs Etnografiska Museum (Museum of the Peoples) in Sweden.

After returning from Panama, she pursued a PhD in cultural anthropology at University of California at Berkeley, where the majority of her work focused on the use of art in daily life among the Kuna. She followed the work of Lila O'Neale and Nelson H.H. Graburn, using analysis of ethnoaesthetics to understand the art of Kuna women from the perspective of the individual artists within the framework of their own culture. For instance, among the Kuna, only women create visual art, as opposed to verbal arts or oratory, and its creation is a communal experience. Women and girls of all ages work together, share designs and learn from each other. The social element bonds these women together, and it reinforces other elements in society, as Kuna art is intertextual, referring to and borrowing from other arts and media. Artistic form is important in Kuna life, beyond the aesthetics of a piece: it informs notions of performance and ritual in addition to reflecting social values upheld in those performances. Visual art allows the Kuna to identify themselves as a separate and isolated group, but also crosses social boundaries as the Kuna have sought controlled contact; this last is demonstrated in the molas themselves, which have incorporated non-Kuna elements since the 1920s.