Seminars

Humans, animals, and deities often walk in the artworks of Teotihuacan, one of the two largest cities of the ancestral Indigenous Americas. While the Teotihuacan walking scenes have only occasionally been addressed as a coherent corpus, depictions of walking humans have been more often discussed. Scholars have tended to understand their subject matter as that of groups of individuals walking in a single moment, a reading that has in turn served as one basis for understanding ancient Teotihuacan society as having perhaps been ruled by a governing council rather than monarchs. Little scholarship has probed why walking emerged as a primary subject matter of Teotihuacan artworks, and Indigenous comprehensions of what these works depict have been largely neglected. I demonstrate that alternate reading modes for Teotihuacan representations of walking humans would have been viable and perhaps more appropriate among a Mesoamerican viewership. I situate these scenes of walking humans within the broader tradition of Teotihuacan walking representations to suggest possible Indigenous significances of these works. This analysis necessitates a reevaluation of Teotihuacan’s governance structure and religious practices.

Andean textiles—beautiful and complex—are full of aesthetic and technical marvels whose features are created through processes that link to conceptual ideas. The most basic concept of weaving a cloth with four finished edges, without cutting from the loom, underlies the primary textile traditions of the region. This requires the idea of intent: something made to be what it is intended to be, with forethought and planning. And this begins before weaving, before warping, before even spinning the yarns that will be used. This talk will be based on the work that led to a recent publication for the Banco de Crédito del Perú called Arte y Saber del Textil (Textile Art and Knowledge), in which I had the opportunity to explore some of the basic underlying ideas around the making of Andean textiles. Focusing on key elements that provide a glimpse of significant conceptual choices, we will look at some of what I consider to be extraordinary things.

Information from hieroglyphs and iconography suggests that Late Classic Maya (c. 600–900 CE) royal portraits in stone could be considered animate. Images of less exalted figures in the Maya world, however, are less clearly defined. In this seminar, I consider depictions of captured individuals in Classic Maya art. I argue that ancient Maya people interacted with sculpted captives in ways that mirror the treatment of human bodies, suggesting such sculptures also possessed agency. Beyond clarifying the role of captive imagery in Classic Maya centers, I examine the implications of this type of research: what would an art history that incorporates object persons look like in terms of theory and methodology? How does recognizing sculptures as community members change our approach to their study and care? Moving beyond a traditional art historical emphasis on people in power, this seminar expands our focus to consider historically overlooked actors in flesh and in stone.

In my talk, I examine the ambitious project by the Peruvian collective EPS Huayco known as Sarita Colonia—a massive portrait of the folk saint worshipped by the underclasses of Lima constructed out of 12,000 recycled cans of evaporated milk on the mountain slope overlooking the Pan American Highway, on the outskirts of the city, in October 1980. In the local artistic context, Sarita Colonia constituted an unprecedented gesture. A monumental work of art created as ephemeral and temporary was displaced from the sanctioned gallery circuit in the upper- and middle-class neighborhoods to the city’s periphery, facing one of the principal routes of migration from the economically impoverished provinces to the capital. It also celebrated a popular heroine, venerated by those very migrants. Consequently, in Peru, Sarita Colonia is celebrated as the paradigmatic example of a long-sought-after “authentic” Peruvian form of cultural expression that simultaneously epitomizes the pinnacle of the Peruvian “socialist utopia” (1976–81)—that is, the moment of struggle for a radical democracy curtailed by the eruption of the Internal Conflict. In contrast, I show that despite EPS Huayco’s self-professed emancipatory goals, their project largely reproduces the engrained nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural construction of race in Peru as inscribed in the country’s specific geography. In that sense, it constructs the urban migrant as an inherently racialized “other”—the one who laboriously supports the state while perennially remaining its outcast. Thus, Sarita Colonia foreshadows the impending disarticulation of leftist politics and the collapse of Peru’s social democratic transformation in the 1980s.

Humans, animals, and deities often walk in the artworks of Teotihuacan, one of the two largest cities of the ancestral Indigenous Americas. While the Teotihuacan walking scenes have only occasionally been addressed as a coherent corpus, depictions of walking humans have been more often discussed. Scholars have tended to understand their subject matter as that of groups of individuals walking in a single moment, a reading that has in turn served as one basis for understanding ancient Teotihuacan society as having perhaps been ruled by a governing council rather than monarchs. Little scholarship has probed why walking emerged as a primary subject matter of Teotihuacan artworks, and Indigenous comprehensions of what these works depict have been largely neglected. I demonstrate that alternate reading modes for Teotihuacan representations of walking humans would have been viable and perhaps more appropriate among a Mesoamerican viewership. I situate these scenes of walking humans within the broader tradition of Teotihuacan walking representations to suggest possible Indigenous significances of these works. This analysis necessitates a reevaluation of Teotihuacan’s governance structure and religious practices.

In south-central Veracruz, Mexico, representations of ballplayers, captives, kings, and queens defy clear categorizations. These images are made more complex by costume and gender designations, hierarchical proportion, natural sexual dimorphism, and symbolic roles versus historic portraiture—distinctions that their makers may have intentionally blurred. On stone stelae, mural paintings, and narrative ceramics, rulers wear ballgame regalia; captive ballplayers can sometimes be seen towering above their captors; and elite women take part in the “dressing,” binding, and ritual beheading of ballplayers or subjugated rulers. Archaeologists have found ritually-interred figurines and skeletal remains with abundance in Classic Veracruz architecture (ca CE 250-1000). These caches contain tableaus of small, medium, and large-scale ceramic sculpture in conjunction with primary and secondary burials, along with deposits of dismembered human skeletal remains. Ceramic figures were designed to enact scenes depicting captives, tribute, the Mesoamerican ballgame, and an underworld inhabited by deities and supporting players. Decapitated human burials interred with stone ballgame sculptures and other high-status offerings beg the question: were these defeated ballplayers, or kings in ballplayer costume? Or, is the mutability of varied roles and outcomes inherent to Classic Veracruz narrative representation?

It has been almost 30 years since the publication of my book African Art in Transit, and the release of its accompanying documentary film In and Out of Africa. In this presentation, I will reflect on some of the key points raised in the book and film; situate my research in Côte d'Ivoire during the late 1980s within the broader context of subsequent scholarship on art markets and trade; and discuss how my research in the 1980s influenced some of the more recent archival research I have been engaged in regarding American medical missionary Dr. George W. Harley, and his involvement in the African art market in Liberia during the 1950s and 1960s.

Drawing on the Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives (Morgan Library and Museum) and the Stendahl Art Galleries Records (Getty Research Institute), this paper addresses letters and other documents exchanged between dealers of pre-Hispanic art in the United States and their sources and clients in the mid-twentieth century regarding pieces they were hoping to acquire or sell, which at times involved smuggling items from source countries. I address these letters as a particular genre of writing in which business and personal relations are intertwined, and in which colonial or other geopolitical power structures come to the fore. I consider in particular the ways they speak about objects, and how the terms change depending on who is the correspondent, what is the reason for the exchange, and where the object is in its physical journey or conceptual transformation, for instance, from archaeological artifact to sellable commodity to museum artwork. As such, I discuss how their exchanges transformed individual pieces and contributed to art historical and museum discourse about pre-Hispanic art that persists today.