share interactive transcript request transcript/captions live captions
download
|
MyPlaylist
[AUDIO LOGO] ANDREW WEISLOGEL: Welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm Andy Weislogel. I'm the Seymour R. Askin Jr. Class of '47 curator of early European and American art here, at the museum. I'm delighted to have you all here this afternoon, especially giving us the gift of coming indoors on this beautiful afternoon, which is a difficult thing. So I'm very impressed.
We're here this evening to celebrate the student team that worked to curate our major fall exhibition, Colonial Crossings, Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas. This is their evening. And we have a number of them here. If you participated in the exhibition, would you please put up a hand so we can identify who you are?
You're going to get a chance to talk with all of these terrific students in the second part of our program. But as I say, I'm delighted to have this opportunity. And I want to thank Saraphina Masters for organizing this program, to give us this opportunity to get to know the exhibition, to get to know the student curators, and learn a little bit more about this period that we're all-- been so fascinated with over the past few months or so.
So my role tonight is to kick things off, to talk a little bit about the background and context of the exhibition, how it was developed, some of the activities that the students were involved in. So I'll start out with some of the basic themes of the exhibition.
This, to start out with, is the first exhibition of colonial Latin American art that's ever been offered at Cornell. So we're very pleased to be able to do that. It offers an introduction to the cultural complexity and themes of colonial Latin American Art made between approximately 1600 and 1850, a time of economic trade, religious conversion, political transformation, but also, of course, colonial violence, resistance, and ultimately, revolution.
The show examines colonial constructions of race and class, gendered and religious identities, and questions of Indigenous and Afro-Latin-American visibility and erasure. And in part in this exhibition, we're seeking to combat a misconception about this field of art, which is fading, but still holds among people who don't know that much about this period of art yet.
In the past, colonial Latin American art has sometimes been glossed over as merely derivative of or copies after European models, and an art that's been difficult to characterize because it was produced during such a tumultuous and often painful period.
I think you will see, in the course of your visit to the exhibition, if you haven't already seen it, in the second part of our program today, the beauty, the spiritual richness, the complexity of these works that tell amazing stories, foreground, skilled makers and techniques, and draw us into a complex world that offers many lessons for our own world today. I
Also want to make sure to offer our gratitude to the important lenders to the exhibition, the Denver Art Museum, the Hispanic Society of America, and especially the Thoma Foundation, who not only furnished 24 of the paintings that you'll see upstairs, but who are also underwriting our scholarly symposium, which is going to take place here, in this room, on November 8 and 9. So I encourage you to mark your calendars for that. So many thanks to them all for bringing these wonderful works of art for us to work with.
So I'm a curator of pre-modern European art. And my co-curator, Professor Ananda Cohen-Aponte is an expert on colonial Andean painting. So had been wanting to collaborate together on a project like this for some time, that offers such opportunities to examine hybrid culture and this period in history more closely from our various respective vantage points. Professor Cohen-Aponte couldn't be here with us this evening. But I think she may be with us remotely. So we'll give her a virtual hello and shout out and thanks for being such a terrific partner and leader on this project.
So the first part of my-- and here she is, on the far right, with our student group, on our field trip to Buffalo. In the spring, we co-led a curatorial practicum in which 13 students, many of whom, as I mentioned, are here this evening, of course, worked together to research the works, write and translate the wall labels into Spanish, and develop the exhibition layout, and many other, many other related tasks.
And I'm also thrilled to say that last week, as some of you know, the show was mentioned in The New York Times in last Friday's Arts edition. So that's really huge for us. And I'm specifically gratified that they mentioned the participation of the students. And they said art history. Not all of you are art historians, I realize. But that's still a pretty good endorsement of what you worked on. So congrats on that.
And on that note, in terms of media and spreading the word, you're doing a good job already. Witness this room full of people. But please, spread the word about this unique opportunity to see these works here, at Cornell, throughout the semester. And thanks again for coming.
So how does an exhibition like this come about? Some of us in this room are familiar with this document and its many permutations. This is a snapshot of the checklist of loans to the exhibition that were ready to go from outside sources when we started the semester.
Our goal for the semester was to combine academic art historical research with hands-on experiential learning about the curatorial process to give the students and the teachers an opportunity to steep themselves in the literature in the field, intensive discussions, and to learn about artists, materials, and techniques, especially those native to the Americas context.
So as I say, we started with this list, dividing them up into thematic groups, and having students choose individual works of interest on which to conduct research. We complemented those outside loans with works from Cornell collections, both from our own, here at the Johnson Museum, and also from the Division of Rare and Manuscripts collection at Kroch Library, where we had a wonderful session investigating 16th, 17th, and 18th-century imprints from and about the Americas, two of which figure in the exhibition.
The group also considered the resonances of the colonial Americas in exhibitions by contemporary Latinx artists, Narsiso Martinez here in Buffalo, at the AKG Art Museum, and here at Cornell, Guadalupe Maravilla in a show that many of you saw here last spring, all the while, taking mental notes about how to install their own exhibition.
We also had a trip to the Buffalo State Art Conservation Department, which helped with an understanding of the materials of art in the colonial Americas context and lessons on how to restore and care for pictures, learn more about them, especially since so many of their makers are unknown to us. And that's Professor Fiona Beckett at the center, next to Emily, who she and her students hosted us for that.
Back home, we applied various techniques to reveal histories of care and repair of certain works in the exhibition, in this case, UV light, and then got down to discussions, intensive discussions and friendly arguments about how to arrange all of these works in the limited space available, according to themes and aesthetic concerns, which is a really fun and intensive, as I say, intensive exercise. Students even wielded paint brushes to prepare pedestals for the exhibition. And this is the last one, going into the gallery in the middle of the summer, in July.
So after that introduction to the student process of putting together the exhibition, I wanted to take a step back and offer just a little bit of context that I think will help you understand and engage with the works upstairs, in the-- there's a couple chairs in the front here, if you want to come up. Sure-- that will help you experience the works upstairs, in the second part of the program.
So here's a map of the colonial Americas. And we're familiar with Christopher Columbus and voyages of discovery-- you can put my laptop on the floor and use that chair. That's no problem. Just put it on the floor. It's fine. Yeah. --and the voyages of exploration in the 1490s, Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, et cetera, that set this process in motion and which, of course, became campaigns of conquest by people like Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro.
And that led to the establishment of the viceroyalties that divided the Spanish-colonial world, the two main and initial ones being New Spain, which extended, as you see, well into the territory that is now the United States, and the viceroyalty of Peru, which you see in the right-hand slide, these political divisions of the territory that yielded for of course, various reasons, immense wealth and fostered centers of large population.
And just for example, if you think the year 1687, Boston had about 7,000 inhabitants. Lima had 80,000, so just to give you an idea of what we're talking about here. This is immense wealth and prosperity, to a large degree, is of course, also directly related to-- and we need to signal-- the trade in enslaved people in the Americas, as well, which begins in around 1510, 1511, with the first enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, and then in 1542, the abolition of Amerindian slavery under the so-called New Laws of the Indies.
So that had the upside, if you will, of enabling Indigenous peoples to participate more fully in colonial society, and of course, the accompanying downside of increasing the number of enslaved Africans that were brought to the Americas.
But we're here to speak specifically about the art. And so we're talking about art styles and methods and modes that in many cases, are brought from Spain and from other places in Europe. And these models of Catholic art play an important role in the widely and broadly successful conversion efforts over the peoples of the Americas. Many European artists themselves are imported into the Americas to create religious art.
But this art, as we'll see, does not remain static. It becomes changed, diversified, influenced, and transformed in myriad ways in the process. Indigenous schools of artists sprang up. Indigenous beliefs and ideas are often reflected in visually hybridized works of art that are completely unique and bear little resemblance to what has come before.
So in that respect, I'd like to take just the last few minutes of my time to give a brief whirlwind tour of the different themes of the exhibition and some things that you might expect to see, to help orient you as you walk through the show. So our first theme that you encounter, not surprisingly in an exhibition of this type, is the theme of the Virgin Mary, Holy mother and Queen.
The Virgin Mary, in the Catholic world and especially in the colonial Latin American world, is the ultimate spiritual protector, celebrated for performing thousands of miracles across the vast territories of the Spanish Americas. Local apparitions or individual appearances of the Virgin attracted pilgrims to visit her shrines, but also spread far beyond the original site of her apparition.
So this is a painting you'll see upstairs, Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquiquirá, which is a painting about restoration and miraculous renewal because it's a painting, the original of which, in Chiquiquirá, was damaged by water dripping from a leaky roof. But due to the prayers of a local woman, it was miraculously restored to even better condition than it existed in prior to the damage. And so it's revered and copied, and the image distributed broadly.
This-- which looks gigantic on the screen, and when you see it upstairs, is about this big-- is an alms box devoted to the Virgin of Regla, which is a Black virgin sculpture, which was imported into Spain in the third century, and gave rise to many copies, some of which made their way across the Atlantic. The Virgin of Regla is
Sacred to seafarers and people who ply their trade on the sea. So it wasn't long before, in the colonial period, versions of that sculpture made their way across the Atlantic, to places like Havana and Tenerife, in the Canary islands, and places like that. And so she's seen as a spiritual protector. And her image was subsequently reclaimed by both enslaved and free Africans who survived the Middle Passage.
So she becomes an important presence. And this is from the end of the 18th century. And it was a box. You'll see it has a coin slot in it. It's designed to collect alms for the poor. That's the original virgin of Regla, in Spain.
The complex social fabric of colonial Latin America, we delve into that in the central part of the gallery. And I just wanted to signal, one of the pictures in that part of the gallery, through exploration, colonization, and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as trade with Asia, colonial Latin America emerged as the first truly global society in the history of the world. And so multiracial societies spring up all over the colonial world in Latin America, of course, with a range of conflict or harmony, depending on what's going on.
But this is a fascinating and really singular and unique picture. On the one side, it's a portrait of a white peninsular Spaniard, a high-ranking judge in Caracas. The picture shows us his status. The scroll at the right shows us his resume, his Spanish education. His coat of arms shows us his family history.
But if you look at the back of the picture, you see a very carefully written inscription that identifies the picture-- I'm sorry, that identifies the artist as Rafael Ochoa of Black status. He did this in Caracas in the year 1793.
So as far as we know, this is the only picture from the colonial context that's signed by an artist who has presented himself as a Black member of this society. So you have the two sides of this picture, if you will, really tell a fascinating story about the society of Caracas at this time.
Passion, imagery, and personal devotion is another section. A lot of the religious images that are not related to the Virgin Mary are clustered in this section of the exhibition. And they often draw upon patterns of symbolism and iconography from Europe that had fallen out, more into disuse, but were fascinating in the colonial context.
So we have here, for example, an image that in the European context, is usually shown as the veil of Saint Veronica, a miraculous apparition of the face of Jesus on a handkerchief that was offered to him while he was carrying the cross to Calvary, the veil of Saint Veronica. But in the Peruvian context, you sometimes see what is called The Trifacial Trinity.
And there's some evidence to suggest that this was more palatable and more in harmony with Indigenous belief systems. And so it was very popular. And it persisted even after the Church in Rome outlawed depictions like this in 1628, well into the 18th century. So this is a uniquely colonial context type of picture.
There are also a number of images that make reference to prints in the exhibition. Prints that come from Europe are extremely important as influences for painting compositions and things like that. Here, we have this wonderful painting, sort of unsettling painting, image, of an archangel who also happens to be holding a gun.
And there's some evidence to suggest that European military manuals were responsible for providing models for these. But they also spring up as a whole subgenre in the Peruvian context. And they offer this interesting balance between the power and the frightening nature of firearms in the colonial context, and also the protective nature of the angel depicted. There's a duality that's presented there. So this is a magnificent picture of the angel with the harquebus.
So I think-- oh, yeah, the final theme that I'll speak about is that landscape, place making, and local knowledge. Landscape painting does not exist as its own genre at this point yet. But landscape bleeds its way into so many of these pictures.
And it's really fascinating to look at an example like this, for example, of an image depicting the story of Noah's Ark, which in its composition, is taken from a European print, from a Bible that was published in the first decade of 17th century, but is brought into the colonial context through the addition, for example, of local fauna, such as armadillos that you see on the far right and llamas at the top, and then, of course, also the inclusion of people who are clearly Indigenous joining the humans boarding the Ark, as well.
And there's some indication that the mountains in the background relate to the Andes, as well. So there's a process of adjusting models to suit the particular context.
So I will end there with these two fantastic images of Saint Michael the Archangel, who also offers, in the colonial context, this simultaneous expression of Spanish colonial power and dominance and also a protection afforded to the people, an image that of course, is iconographically pervasive in the European context, but also gets transformed in specifically American ways, especially through the costume of these two different angels, which has Indigenous aspects, as well.
So I've left only one theme left to speak about. But it's a really important one. And so I'm going to hand the microphone over now to one of the students in the exhibition, Juliana Fagua Arias, who is a PhD student in the History of Art, who's going to talk about her experience with the exhibition and how her research dovetails with it. So Juliana.
[APPLAUSE]
JULIANA FAGUA ARIAS: OK, hello, everyone. And welcome. [SPEAKING SPANISH]. Very happy to be sharing this experience with all of you. So like Andy mentioned, my name is Juliana. And I am a third year PhD student in the History of Art department. I was part of this curatorial practicum in the fall semester, where I had the pleasure of working with the undergrads and a couple of other grad students to develop the themes of this exhibition.
And I also did some graduate-- I was a graduate research assistant over the summer, working on a few specific tasks that allowed me to explore other themes and other topics of the exhibition, outside of my designated research area. But just to give you an idea of my dissertation and my interest, I'm focusing on transpacific trade and artistic connections between Asia and Latin America during the colonial period, which is a really understudied area.
When you think about colonial Latin America, you often frame it with the Atlantic at the center. And often, the idea that there were these very distinct and relevant dynamics happening in the Pacific and being facilitated through the Pacific tends to be forgotten. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that and about how that reflects in the exhibition. And I'm also going to give you an idea of why this exhibition was so important in terms of my career goals too.
So just to start, these are two of the other projects that I worked on for the exhibition and that you'll get to see downstairs. So I got to design this really cool map, showing the Spanish empire and the trade connections, and to give an idea of how globally connected Latin America really was during this period of time.
And also, we wanted to provide a visual for people to understand, for people that are, of course, less familiar with the context of colonial Latin America, what we mean when we talk about a viceroyalty, which is a very distinct geographical and political unity that applies very specifically to the Hispanic Americas in this time.
This idea of centering the Americas really allows you to get a notion of how wide these connections-- how expansive they were, and really get Asia in this visual too, and highlight all of the global-- all of the trade routes that were meaningful for the development and the artistic creativity and development of Latin American art during this period.
And I also got to work on this timeline, which I think was set up recently, and to give an idea of, what are the key milestones and important dates for people to map out all of the content that this exhibition provides.
More specifically, this is the section that I researched about and that I wrote about. It's called Asia in the Americas. So to give a brief introduction to this topic, in 1565, Spain conquered the Philippine islands. And they inaugurated what became known as the Manila galleon trade, which was this yearly trip across the Pacific, that connected the city of Manila with the city of Acapulco in Mexico. It had other ports in Latin America. But Acapulco was the one that received most material.
And this trade circuit really was nurtured by the previously established South China Sea trade, which of course, existed before the Spaniards arrived to the Philippines. But it allowed for a lot of material and luxury objects and spices and all sorts of things to arrive to the Philippines and be distributed.
So we had cottons coming from India. We had silks coming from China and porcelains from China too. We had spices, lacquered furniture.
So all of this material arrived in Latin America after the 1570s and really made an impact, not only in the conception of taste and what it meant to have good taste, but also because it elicited a lot of creative responses from the artisans in the Americas.
So these are some of the examples of the objects that you'll see in the exhibition. Over here, we have of Philippine ivories of Saint Joseph and Christ. Most likely, they were carved in the Philippines by Chinese craftsmen. Or they could have also been carved in China, sent to the Philippines, and then exported to the Americas.
I think it's really interesting. And this section really allows you to look closer at these objects, spend some time with them, and identify some important markers, like if you see the figure of Saint Joseph, can see some markers of Chinese physiognomy, which I think is really fascinating.
I'm going to talk about the cabinet in the middle in a little bit. But on the far right, on the top, you have a tabletop that was made in what is now Colombia. It was made with a technique called [SPEAKING SPANISH], which uses materials local to the Amazon and [SPEAKING SPANISH].
And what these artisans were doing were, they were using pre-Hispanic technique to imitate the shine and luster of Japanese lacquerware. And something similar was happening with the tray that you see in the bottom. It's also called [SPEAKING SPANISH], which is made in Mexico, and was made also with the distinct ingredients and the technique that combines chia oil and other ingredients to elicit this similar style of inky, dark background with overlaid designs.
So before I talk about the cabinet, I just wanted to give a very brief overview of how this exhibition dovetails with my previous experience and curatorial experience.
So very quickly, last semester I curated this show at the Syracuse University, where I got to work with the students of the MFA, students from fine arts, sculpture, video, photography. And I got to learn a little bit more about the purpose of a university museum and thinking through the different conversations that you can have in a setting like this.
Before that, I also curated the show at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, called [SPEAKING SPANISH]. And I got to think through ideas of design and craft and art and how all of these intersect. I was working with a textile design workshop that's based in Mexico City, but works and collaborates with Zapotec master weavers from Oaxaca, from Teotitlán del Valle.
So also thinking about issues of indigeneity and how those are thought about and discussed in a contemporary design workshop and how those collaborations happen was really meaningful to me. And then going back even further, I was very lucky to work for a year at the Met, where I curated this rotation of Louis Tiffany watercolors and projects that the Tiffany studio did in Mexico City and Cuba in the early 20th century. So all of this experience has really informed my approach to Colonial Crossings.
But then I think something that's even more of exciting to me, preparing this presentation, was that I looked back at my master's qualifying paper. And I realized that I had actually thought about and envisioned an exhibition on transpacific trade.
So I designed this exhibition in 2021. I titled it Seafaring Treasures, Latin America and the trans-Pacific trade. And I worked on this sketch up to think through main ideas that I would want to talk about, objects that I would want to include.
And so this is just screenshots of some of the galleries that I thought I would include. And essentially, what I was thinking was, how did this trade with Asia affected the different spheres and layers of Latin American society in the colonial period?
So I thought about the public sphere and how objects were sold in the public market, were sold and bought, and how this trade with Asia affected public spaces like markets. I also thought about the religious sphere and spaces like churches, how citizens in colonial Latin America would have furnished their churches, and the connections with missionary workshops. And then I thought about the domestic sphere and the household and the presence of these objects in the household.
And I was shocked to find a lot of resonances in these two projects that were not really intended. And like I said, I just realized them a couple of days back. You can see that at the top, I had already conceived of this map of the Spanish Americas and how it connected, in terms of trade, with Europe, with Asia.
And I embarked on this exact same project for this exhibition. And then also, objects that I already that I had envisioned that I would include in this show, I happen to be able to work with, see up close, and not only see them exhibited, but see them as they were unpacked, see them when they were assembled. Of all of these backstage was really meaningful.
And then a couple of other examples, I could envision this wall with ivories. And I was lucky, also to work with ivories for this show and the same dialogue here, between the desk and the [SPEAKING SPANISH] that you'll see in the galleries right now. I was able to also research that and write through that too because we also have a [SPEAKING SPANISH] here.
So I just feel really lucky to-- it came full circle. But at the same time, it felt like, well now, the next step is for me to hopefully design a whole show and curate a whole show that focuses on these. And I think this is one step forward in that.
And then I just want to end by looking a little bit more closely at this writing cabinet. And we can talk about the rest of the objects in the galleries. And I'm happy to answer any questions and talk more about this. But I think that this writing cabinet in the center is particularly-- it resonated with me in a particular way.
So what we have here is, it's a writing cabinet. But you can see, it has all of these little drawers where you would keep your inks, your pens, your documents, materials for writing letters. And you have even a lot of drawers that are secret, that we got to see when the conservator from the Hispanic Society came. There are a lot of drawers on that side, that you would slide. So that's secret compartments.
This writing cabinet was made in the workshop of an artist of Indigenous descent called Jose Manuel de la Zerda in Mexico. And you can even see the signature of de la Zerda in this image, over here. And I want to challenge you to, when you go down to the galleries, try to find the signature.
We had a small debate, a short debate, about whether or not to exhibit it in a way where people could see the signature. And we ended up deciding that was the right thing to do because having a signature of a furniture artist that's also of Indigenous descent, it's pretty magnificent because if you think about it, even now, furniture makers don't really sign their artworks.
But back then, these artisans worked in a guild system that was set up to make invisible the labor and the creativity of Indigenous makers and Black makers. So to have de la Zerda's signature here as a testimony, as a marker of the high quality and the inventiveness and the creativity of furniture, is pretty amazing.
We also have these narratives unfolding all throughout the writing cabinet and this invented and imagined fantasy land that is supposed to reference an exoticized East. So you see the-- I always forget the name of these-- the willows. And you see these houses that are designed in a pagoda style, and even over here, these writers with turbans.
So you can see how artisans in Latin America were also imagining Asia. And they were literate in several different mediums that allowed them to do that. One of them was prints, like Andy mentioned. And this is a print that is in the exhibition.
So you can see how they were recreating costume and positions and landscape and landscape markers. So I want to stress this idea that we often think about Europe imagining the Americas. But the Americas were also doing their own imagining of other lands. I think that's pretty fantastic.
And then lastly, not only were these artisans literate in this visual culture that was coming from Europe, but also they had this whole other group of objects that were coming from the Pacific. And they were reinterpreting these styles and recreating them, using their own knowledge. So we have this Chinese table screen that's also in the gallery. This screen is made with a technique that's called [? maquia. ?] And it uses a type of lacquer called urushi. And this comes from a tree. It's a resin of a tree.
And we have this, like I mentioned before, this inky black background that has been layered and layered and layered with lacquer and then polished, and the inclusion of gold leaf. So in de la Zerda, we have this a very similar gesture, with this dark background and then the gold leaf and the pigments and this taste for jewel tones and wanting to highlight color.
But instead of using tree resin, the lacquer makers, furniture makers in Mexico were working with these two materials that you see in the bottom, chia oil over here, and then [SPEAKING SPANISH], which is the fatty acid of an insect. And they were mixing this with mineral clays and creating this lacquer material.
And I think that's also really, really significant because this technique of working with chia oil was virtually eradicated when the Spaniards came to the Americas, the knowledge of it. It's pretty impressive that it got to survive because in the effort of conversion, materiality was one of the things that held a lot of symbolism and meaning. And essentially, what they wanted to do was uproot that and place something else in its stead.
So there's a lot of work that's being done currently in identifying the presence of Chia oil in these objects and in paintings because if you can imagine in the conservation field, the focus for decades has been linseed oil and how to identify the presence of linseed oil.
And when you actually look at this in a chemical level, linseed and Chia oil are very, very similar. So the fact that there's even this effort, at this point, to generate new tools and new techniques to identify the presence of these materials-- and think about, maybe chia oil also traveled to Europe. It was not only linseed oil that came here.
But maybe there were artists in Europe using chia oil. We don't know because we don't have the tools yet to identify it. And the way that we've been able to realize its presence here is because of recipes that we have in our archives, shopping lists.
So anyway, I'm happy to talk more with you about all of this downstairs. But I hope you enjoy the show. And yeah, I think that's it. OK.
[APPLAUSE]
This special event was held in celebration of “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish America” (July 20–December 15, 2024), the first exhibition of colonial Latin American art at Cornell.
The works of art and student research from the Spring 2024 course that developed the exhibition recognize the creative agency and resilience of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race artists during a tumultuous historical period bookended by conquest and revolution, and consider the profound impact of colonization, evangelization, and the transatlantic slave trade in the visual culture of the Spanish empire.
Andrew Weislogel, the Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Johnson Museum, and Juliana Fagua Arias, PhD student in the History of Art, provide a brief overview of the exhibition’s conception, development, and resulting research.
