The "Costumbrismo" (meaning "folklife") series is contemporary, although it's hard to tell. It's a world without computers, cell phones or television. Electricity is still rare.
           Ms. Seminario has a cartoonist's gift for clarity and narrative. Although the compositions are dense with details, careful draftsmanship keeps the colorful interlocking threads of narrative separate and equal..
          Her style is faux naive. Diego Rivera and the Brueghels may be influences. Like them, she can depict sentiment without sentimentality.
          In "Testing the Pot," a vendor of ollas (handmade clay pots) has set up shop outdoors. Fifteen colorfully dressed customers have surrounded her and her wares. The pots represent a whole smorgasbord of Peruvian pot styles, a deliberate inclusion. "They are authentic," the artist said. They are busy, inspecting pots, tapping them (flawed ones sound different), haggling, talking, arguing.
          As intricate as this one is, "At the Station" is 10 times as intricate. The scene is in the village zocalo or "square," where dozens of people are attempting to board a rickety old bus with heaps of luggage in a crowd of nosy friends and chattering onlookers. In one corner, a mother says goodbye, close to tears, to her small son. "He's off to the city for school," the artist explained.

STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE, New York – USA
Michael J. Fressola, Arts Editor
January, 2007

Life in the Andes “Beyond Costumbrismo”
          It's no accident that artist Betty Seminario's rural Peruvians resemble her Lenape Indians, the first inhabitants of Staten Island. She figures they had to be cousins. All are descendants of the migrants who wandered into the New World from Asia 18,000 years ago. Why wouldn't there be a family resemblance?
          Ms. Seminario's ties to both worlds, Peru and pre-European Staten Island -- are in two North Shore venues this winter. Her mural-sized recreations of Lenape life are part of a permanent installation at the Staten Island Museum.
          Half a neighborhood away, her colorful genre scenes of rural Peru ("Beyond Costumbrismo: Paintings and Drawings of Peruvian Folklife") are at the Cromwell Center in Tompkinsville.
          The artist is interested in anthropology, naturally, and both sets of images are "accurate." At the museum, associate science curator Ray Matarazzo consulted on the development of the paintings, which depict tools and artifacts preserved in the museum's collections.Human possibilities appeal to her. In a drawing of the arrival of the Lenape, a blizzard is under way -- a potentially dire situation for the fur-swathed travelers.
          But the smallest members of the band are oblivious. "Children will always be children," the artist said, pointing to a corner of the drawing where three small kids have detoured into a snow bank. Unexpectedly, human scenarios brighten the other two pictures ("Archaic" and "Woodlands") in the Lenape timeline.
          "Beyond Costumbrismo: Paintings and Drawings of Peruvian Folklife" the eight-piece suite of paintings and drawings of life in the Andes outback is funnier. The artist, who was born and raised in Lima was unaware of the humor and nuance of the life of the campesinos.

WORLD WITHOUT IPODS
          She was always interested in them, however. Early renditions were done in art school, from images in books. Later, she spent time in the high-altitude Inca villages she celebrates in "Beyond Costumbrismo.
          "The exposure became unexpectedly useful during a 15 year stay in Italy, where she drew a popular cartoon about the adventures of a Peruvian milk maid named Beltrilda,