Carmen Benavente Orrego-Salas
Carmen Benavente Orrego-Salas is a Chilean artist and teacher. She had a successful program supporting women in Ninhue, Chile to make pictorial embroidery, which led to her teaching workshops in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. Carmen passed away on Sunday September 28, 2025.
From the first moment I began teaching embroidery, more than forty years ago, I tried to teach my students the importance of creating their own designs, once they had a basic vocabulary of stitches. I emphasized the unique character of each stitch and its mutations according to spacing, direction, material, and color. In short, I taught only the techniques of the craft. When it came to design, I encouraged my students to be unpretentious, to examine what interested them, and to turn first to what was close to them and what they knew best. I assured them they would instinctively find the capacity to represent these things, and their confidence would take root as they made choices about stitches, texture, and color.
— Carmen Benavente
Embroiderers of Ninhue: Stitching Chilean Rural Life