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[AUDIO LOGO] ANDY: Hello again, everyone. It's time to move forward with our third session of the symposium, third and final session of the symposium. And I'm delighted to introduce our theme of Temporal Interventions: Musical Heritage and Contemporary Art and the Spanish Colonial World. You might say. contemporary and non-contemporary art in the Spanish colonial world, when all is said and done.
And our first of two speakers for this session is Patricia Garcia Gil from Cornell. She is the current Postdoctoral Associate and Artist in Residence at the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards here at Cornell. A versatile musician, she's won numerous international piano and Forte piano competitions, and her brilliant career has already given rise to numerous concert tours throughout the world. With her repertoire choices and research, she strives to enhance overlooked musicking practices and reach out to audiences who connect rarely with classical music.
Most recently, Garcia Gil was named "Early Music America Emerging Artist." She performed as a soloist with the Smithsonian Academy Orchestra, was featured at the Berkeley and Bloomington Early Music Festivals, and released an album with the complete piano works of Pauline Viardot. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies in Early Music America.
Patricia also co-hosts the popular program, International Fortepiano Salon, so you're in for a treat from her today, both as a speaker and as a performer. And we're delighted to add this collaboration with the Music Department to our symposium this afternoon, in this examination of broader culture in the colonial Latin Americas. Patricia's talk is entitled "Voices of Influence: Exploring Power Dynamics in the Conservation of Musical Heritage in Colonial Latin America." Please join me in welcoming her.
[APPLAUSE]
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Thank you. Thank you very much, oh, sorry, for this opportunity of collaborating with this very, very interesting symposium from which I'm learning so much by being in this interconnected field, and just knowing how music and art are just one thing, and-- oh, thank you. OK.
During the colonial period, from the early conquest of the Americas through the 18th and 19th centuries, the cultural transfer between Iberia and Latin America was typically asymmetrical, influenced by power dynamics. European musical traditions, particularly those of Spain, were brought to Latin America by colonizers and missionaries. Music of the Catholic Church was prominent, and many of the most active composers during the 17th and 18th centuries were priests. Sacred music not only served to express religious beliefs, but to reinforce the dominance of the conquerors. Not surprisingly, it is mostly Christian religious music of the colonial period that has been preserved and studied.
One reason that justifies this fact is the ephemeral nature of music. As Indigenous and African music were primarily transmitted through oral tradition, the most lasting evidence of musical practices is represented through paintings and decorations on various objects, or testimonies from witnesses, though that kind of evidence would not allow us to reproduce the actual music they were performing. However, the difficulty in finding secular music created during the colonial period within European traditions that rely on written music brings up questions about whether race, class, and gender were factors that led to its obscurity or loss. Historically, scholars have focused on composers and performers, often overlooking communities excluded, by default, from these roles.
Women, despite facing social constraints, contributed significantly to musical culture through other capacities. For most of the colonial period, women had very limited access to the education, and it was based on the principles of Catholicism. Only some girls who belonged to the socioeconomic elite received basic training in reading, writing, and music at home, or in convents.
Toward the end of the 18th century, some institutions started opening their doors to girls of all social classes. Here, it says, [SPEAKING SPANISH].
So like the poorest and the most needed girls, little girls. Both in convents and in schools, especially in Mexico, where more groundwork has been laid, researchers have found manuscript anthologies designed for the private use of women. Most of these compilations include a mix of liturgical and non-liturgical works, of which keyboard sonatas is the most recurrent genre.
In Europe, the solo keyboard sonata developed contemporaneously with the growing importance of instrumental music, the rise of the fortepiano, and the increasing demand of the domestic market for printed music. Its main purpose was educational, a piece to develop technical and musical skills. A large percentage of the potential buyers were women who could dedicate their time to this kind of pleasure, and to cultivate this appreciated skill.
Hand-copied compilations represented an important resource in the colonies, because printed music did not circulate often. Only in the last decades of the 18th century, we find records of Spanish works being published in the Peninsula, such as the two sonatas for harpsichord and fortepiano by Joaquin Montero and Manuel Blasco de Nebra, that I will perform later as an example of the music composed in the motherland.
The performance of music on keyboard instruments, such as the clavichord, virginal, and spinet had been a feminine activity long before the 18th century. Sorry, maybe-- can we go backwards in the slides? Oh, OK. No, this is not backwards. Can I go backwards?
Oh, OK. Sorry, it doesn't work. I wanted you to see the clavichord spinet, but it's covered by the fortepiano, the new instrument that would progressively spread from the court to other social spheres, at first to the nobility and the bourgeoisie, and eventually, perhaps more often during the 19th century, to middle-class homes. Sorry, and this would be the fortepiano.
A notable example reflecting the advancement of domestic music making in varied social spheres that references the new instrument is the case of Maria Antonia Palacios. Her name appears on the front page of a manuscript titled Libro Sesto de Maria Antonia Palacios. This compilation from around 1790 was discovered by the musicologist Guillermo Marchant in a religious Chilean institution, where it had been unseen until 1970.
The hand-copied book is a compilation of compositions attributed to anonymous, perhaps local, as well as Spanish composers, and Haydn, the most acclaimed European composer in the colonies, and who was considered Italian due to his musical language. Intriguingly, according to the Répertoire International de Sources Musicales, the first movement of Haydn's Piano Sonata in C major, Hoboken XVI 35, is notated in the manuscript, but this Chilean source is not known in Anthony Hoboken's thematic catalog, widely accepted as the most comprehensive catalog of Haydn's works.
Marchant examined the question of Maria Antonia Palacios' identity by contrasting documents from different Chilean archives, including the archiepiscopacy and a very plausible death certificate. He pushed aside the idea that she had been Spanish. Instead, he proposed that she had been an enslaved Black woman with musical knowledge, and who was somehow connected to a church as an organist.
Of the 165 works copied into the manuscript, 108 were clearly written for organ, and most likely were intended for liturgical use, while six are specifically composed for the fortepiano, eight for the salterio, that you can see, the kind of instrument that you see on the slides. And the remaining 43 could be performed on any of these keyboard instruments.
Some of the Spanish composers' works included in Palacios' compilation seems to be absent from any archive in Spain. While this manuscript contains a considerable amount of religious music, works such as Joachin Castillion's Sonatas para Pianoforte o Clavecin, dated 1781, that I will perform in a bit, is one source that points to when the fortepiano started to be taught in Spain. So as you can see, well, I'm actually going to perform from this one.
That required a little bit of rearrangement of the parts, as they don't really align as we are used to nowadays with the modern editions. But it's very interesting, because the handwriting conveys more details regarding the practices at the time. And on top of the page, you see the name of the composer, and then that he was a teacher of fortepiano in Madrid, and that this was the price, was six pesetas.
The earliest record showing the entrance of fortepianos in South America has been found in customs archives in Guatemala, as early as 1769. In 1787, English and German fortepianos were reported in Lima and Mexico. And this is very interesting, because it might be related to the kind of instrument that I brought here today.
This instrument is a replica of Gottfried Silbermann, who was a piano-- organ builder, actually, initially, a keyboard builder who lived in Saxony in Germany, the actual Germany, and he would have built this instrument in 1749. Silbermann, who experimented and included his own ideas, like a system to sustain the sound, and another one to imitate the harpsichord sound that you will be able to appreciate in my performance, copied the mechanical action of the Italian pianos of Cristofori and his student Ferrini.
Bartolomeo Cristofori, this is the action of Bartolomeo Cristofori that you're seeing here. Bartolomeo Cristofori was already working on this kind of action that differentiates the fortepiano from other keyboard instruments by the end of the 17th century. By ending each key's action with a small hammer which struck the strings, the performer could have control over the striking speed of the hammer, allowing the instrument to shift gradually from loud to soft, like the human voice.
As with most of the latest inventions, the piano did not become the favorite instrument right away, but spread progressively throughout Europe. And it actually reached Spain first, due to the connections with the Italian Court, and then became the preferred one over the harpsichord by the late decades of the 18th century. And even then, as the sonatas that I am performing show, composers would include in their titles the possibility of using either the harpsichord or the fortepiano to perform their works, probably for commercial reasons.
So what I'm wondering is this. If this instrument that is German, but of Italian tradition, might be the one that they had in mind when they were building pianos in the colonies, or if it might be the one that came from Germany, or if a similar one-- I mean, we know they were building very, very similar ones in Spain.
And then in the colonies, one of the first testimonies that we have of a fortepiano built there, onsite, dates 1793, and appears in a Mexico journal, noticing the organ builder Mariano Placeres first fortepiano. They call it in the other way around. So instead of fortepiano, pianoforte.
Another curious manuscript compilation is the Quaderno de Lecciones y Varias Piezas Para Clabe o Forte Piano Para el Uso de Doña Maria Guadalupe Mayner, a lady who remains of unknown origin. Dated 1804, this lesson notebook is preserved in Mexico City. It contains 50 musical works, including sonatas, dances, songs, and exercises.
This compilation does not include any religious work, as such, though religious symbolism still pervades some of the instrumental works, such as a transcription of Haydn's famous orchestral work, Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, which had been commissioned for the 1786 Good Friday service in Cadiz, Spain. A notable fact is that the minor compilation includes a woman composer's work, The Minuet for Four Hands, written by Marquesa de Vivanco, who is also of unknown origin, or perhaps is another name for Mrs. Mayner herself. It also includes several local composers' works, such as the Minué Variado, composed by Aldana, a Mexican violinist, for the pianist and composer that I will be performing later as well.
These compilations show how playing the harpsichord and the fortepiano was common and desired for women at the time. As Enlightenment principles were spreading across Europe and into the Americas, a new power elite arose in service to the monarchy, although not necessarily aristocrats. It was an elite that now included women from privileged families, who acted frequently as patronesses for musicians, hostesses of musical performances, and who held great music libraries.
Musical performances, commonly held in private spaces of a courtly, aristocratic, or sacred nature, led toward what we know today as a public concert in the form of tertulias, where which were like the French salons, when they happened indoors or saraos, that you can see in this beautiful Biombo, that happened outdoors. Musicians, though, still faced limited income opportunities outside the church, no longer had to be servants of the patrons, and were hired with no exclusivity. Musicians like Aldana, who worked both at the Mexico City Cathedral and at the Teatro Coliseo, were able to participate in freelance events and to engage in seasonal contracts.
The new elite, though mostly represented by the Spanish descent bourgeoisie, included mixed-raced individuals that had been able to escalate through colonial society by connecting themselves to certain institutions, still many times religious, but also the universities, that improved their quality. This concept of calidad served as a hierarchical discourse, shaping Spanish identity, emphasizing that social perception was even more significant than skin color.
A notable example of this is the case of the Afro-Brazilian composer José Mauricio Nunes Garcia, the child of a Guinean descendant who succeeded, probably through priesthood, to reach the highest spheres of Portuguese society, and who published in 1821 the Método de Pianoforte that was taught widely in the colonies. I've chosen this image because it's from a study where they tried to really know how he would look like, because, like many other composers of Color, they were trying to represent whiter.
So the first image is the funeral mask of José Mauricio Nunes Garcia. The second one is the portrait that is like the mainstream portrait of him as a priest. And then the third one is his son, who was a doctor of the same name. And then the fourth would be the reconstruction of how Nunes Garcia might have really looked, just by combining the three other images.
I hope that talking about documents like the compilations associated with Maria Antonia Palacios and Maria Guadalupe minor encouraged the realization of the importance of the role that these women played in history and concretely in the preservation of Spanish and Latin American musical heritage. There are still many research gaps around secular music life of this period that will hopefully intrigue scholars to continue delving into it. There must be more examples of other women whose role has been overlooked, and whose legacy would enrich and enlarge our knowledge of art history. Oh, this was--
Oh, sorry. I was meant to say that this was another example of the advancement of the female gender into the musical scene. This is Ensayos Musicos Para Piano Forte, a piano method that was written by Spanish prodigy child Maria Del Carmen Hurtado y Torres, which was published in 1804, although there are no records of it being taught in any institution. But at least she was able to publish it.
Now you'll hear the kind of repertoire that was performed, that might have been performed, in this private or semi-private ambience in the Iberian Peninsula and in the colonies. These Spanish works that I will perform, or Spanish-influenced works, incorporate the sounds of Spain, the Moorish, Jewish, Gypsy folk dance and guitar, and gallant Italian gestures that were fashionable probably in earlier decades of the 18th century in the rest of Europe.
Here's the program. So I'll perform a sonata by Joachin Castillon, the first three movements. Then a very short minuet that was composed by Aldana, the Mexican fortepianist and violinist, and then another two sonatas. The first one, both of them, actually, of two movements.
I hope you will enjoy this program that I have selected out of the mentioned compilations, and the earlier printed works that were circulating in the Peninsula and maybe in the colonies. And I want to thank you, the Museum. I want to thank Ananda. I want to thank Andy for letting this happen. And also Ken Walkup, who tuned the piano, and my colleagues from the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, also, for letting me use the piano.
Oh, and you will see now, while I'm performing, a video. I was going to say an audiovisual, but there's no audio. I will be the audio. So you will see this video with images that are actually original watercolors from a Spanish artist, who happens to be my mother. And she made them for another project that I presented at the Bloomington Early Music Festival maybe two years ago, I think, now.
And these paintings are-- some of them are after original paintings, some of which you've seen in my slides. Some of them were made out of her own imagination. And I hope they will evoke the kind of scene and visual aspect of the performances that were happening in Spain and in the colonies. Thank you.
I forgot to say, I'm going-- because I want to show you what this piano can do, I'm going to start just playing a couple of chords with the sustained sound that I mentioned that this piano had as an addition to the Cristofori mechanism.
[PLAYS CHORDS]
[PLAYS FORTEPIANO]
[APPLAUSE]
ANDY: Thank you Patricia. Our second talk of the session will be presented by Lucía Abramovich Sánchez, who is the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
She previously served as Associate Curator of Latin American Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas, and has also held curatorial positions at the New Orleans Museum of Art and at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. At MFA Boston, she works with a wide range of artwork that includes decorative arts and sculpture from North America and Latin America, spanning over 3,000 years of history. That's quite a-- that's quite a portfolio.
[LAUGHTER]
Outside the MFA Boston, she's curated several permanent installations, including the recently reinterpreted Latin American Popular Art Gallery at San Antonio. She served as the presenting curator for the exhibitions Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche, and No Ocean Between Us: Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1945 to present, and organized the exhibition, A Legacy in Clay: The Ceramics of Tonalá, Mexico, among other projects.
She holds a PhD from the Latin American Studies in Art History joint doctoral program at Tulane University. Today, Lucía is going to wrap up our time together by considering the concept of "Time-Warping the Museum: Temporal Juxtapositions in Displays of Spanish Colonial Art." Please welcome Lucía Abramovich Sánchez.
[APPLAUSE]
LUCIA ABRAMOVICH SANCHEZ: All right. A little shorter than everyone else. OK, before I begin, I wanted to thank Andy [INAUDIBLE] for the invitation to participate in this terrific conference. And I also want to shout out Elizabeth and Juliana for their assistance before and during the event. I'm really honored to be here among this distinguished group, and thanks to all of you for hanging in there until the end.
So in exploring the gallery images of the exhibition, Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity and Belief in Spanish America, on view here at the Johnson Museum, I honed in on a phenomenon I've seen appear in various recent museum displays that feature art of the Spanish Americas, which I will also refer to as viceregal art in this presentation.
There we go. Here we see three works depicting a mother and child, one from 17th-century Peru, one from approximately 2,000 years ago in what is now the country of Ecuador, and one from 20th century Cuba. These groupings constitute several instances of artwork from eras outside of the viceregal period that appear in this exhibition.
These led me to think about the increased frequency of this display strategy in museums, employed by numerous recent exhibitions that reframe the concept of art of the Americas, specifically the role of historical art in shaping how visitors view this hemispheric idea of America. Works of Spanish-American art are paired with both pre-Hispanic and contemporary works, often spanning great lengths of time. I'm interested in the motivations and the impacts of these groupings, especially when considering the criticisms toward museums concerning the erasure of certain narratives, and the marginalization of historical Latin American artworks in cultural institutions.
Beyond reflecting upon the motivations behind these interventions, I also wish to better understand how we, as museum professionals and experts in the field working in museum contexts, reimagine the Americas by fracturing timelines. Since there are several circumstances where Spanish-American art appears in what I have framed in the title of this talk as the very clunky term, "temporal juxtapositions," it's important to outline some parameters for this concept, as I'll address it today.
So I'll begin by looking into an exhibition where the organizer's objective was to decipher iconographies of colonial power in historical paintings, which included works made in the colonial Americas using interventions of contemporary art. I'll then go over moments in three recent exhibitions designed to reframe art of the Americas, that juxtapose Spanish-American art with works from periods long before and long after the viceregal period. Lastly, I will revisit Colonial Crossings with that perspective gained from the aforementioned examples.
So my first case study comes from the exhibition, Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections, which was on view in Madrid's Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza from June to October of this year. The Colonial Memory exhibition is one of a series of projects coming from the Thyssen's commitment to supporting diverse interpretations of its holdings, with special attention to points of view and initiatives relevant to what they refer to as the "current cultural scene."
It presented a historical analysis of 73 works from the museum's holdings, bringing perspectives that are critical of Western narratives, and emphasizing the processes of occupation of territories, domination of Indigenous populations, and exploitation of resources. Each of the six sections of the exhibition feature a work or a series of works by a contemporary artist from what they deemed the Global South, which is a universally-used term. But most of the artists represented in this exhibition were Latin American, and the contemporary side.
So I want to bring to your attention one such intervention in the exhibition in the sixth and final section of the show, titled Resistance, Marronage, and Civil Rights. The section included three works by Agostino Brunias, also represented in Colonial Crossings. The 18th century Italian painter was primarily active in the Caribbean. These three paintings, all in the Thyssen's collection, embody Brunias's best-known work, his scenes of Santo Domingo, the capital of the British and French Caribbean colony of Dominica, which show colonial society in the Caribbean engaged in everyday activities, such as visiting the market or dancing, as seen in the images here. Brunias's idealized images of the multiracial population of Dominica were commissioned for wealthy white British landowners, drawing comparisons with the genre known as casta painting from Spanish America, intended to classify the most common unions between people of different races.
In the exhibition space, a video made in 2018 by the Argentine artist, Cecilia Bengolea, titled Danza Del Relámpago, or Lightning Dance, was set up amidst the three Brunias pictures. Bengolea's video depicts Jamaican dance hall dancers in the rain, synchronizing with the elements and, as the label infers, expressing their joy and freedom through choreography. At first glance, this juxtaposition feels a bit detached, the separation of Brunias's trio, a group of works with tremendous interpretive strength, with a video made by an artist who themselves is representing a community of people with whom they don't share an ethnic, racial, or social background.
This is not necessarily a criterion for avoiding such a grouping, and perhaps is a compelling reason to unite these works. In the exhibition catalog, the authors connect Bengolea's video with another work by the 17th century Dutch painter, Frans Post, titled Plantation in Brazil, which also features a group of dancing figures, likely enslaved African people, amidst a tropical landscape. This painting is in a different section of the exhibition, titled Escaping to New Arcadias, so the connections made between the African and Afro-descendant people dancing in this group of works wouldn't be immediately interpretable without the insight from the exhibition catalog, which is admittedly where I made these connections. I walked by this fantastic painting without necessarily bookmarking it to make the inference later in the exhibition.
I now wish to turn to a series of recent exhibitions that looked to reframe the canon of Latin American Art, where Spanish-American works feature as snapshots rather than a comprehensive group of works reflecting the range of that genre. The first example, the Denver Art Museum's 2021 exhibition, ReVisión: A New Look at Art in the Americas, considered 2,500 years of artistic production in Latin America as a single, interwoven story, devoid of chronology, that contemplates the ways in which shared cultural values continue to exert influence on artistic production, as the catalog notes. 180 objects from the museum's Ancient Americas collection and Latin American art collection, which includes viceregal to contemporary work, were organized into six sections that explored ideas of place, both regarding land and home, and the story of exploitation and making with raw materials from the region.
In the subtheme, Water that Sustains, part of the opening theme of the exhibition, titled Connections to the Land, the curators juxtaposed this work by the Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin, seen here on your left, with a painting of The Virgin of Valvanera by Cristóbal de Villalpando, perhaps the most famous artists of 17th and early 18th century New Spain. The scenes in Encontro das Aguas, or Meeting of Waters, features a 40-foot long river woven of vinyl-printed satellite imagery of the Amazon and Negro Rivers, where they converge near Manaus, Brazil, the site of an important free trade zone. Tossin's work offers a complex view of convergence, not only of the two rivers, but also of foreign capital and local tradition, represented by fishing nets and baskets woven from the Amazon-- from Amazon packaging, and terracotta objects that also comprised the installation.
The Virgin of Valvanera is indicated in the exhibition's access guide as a depiction of Spanish belief in life-giving water, thereby initiating the pattern that dominates this section. While the painting of this Marrian devotion forms part of a group of objects that speak to the powerful vision of water in Latin American art, a more complete panorama of the cult of the Virgin of Valvanera in the Spanish Americas, and the background of this artist, Villalpando, one of the region's most renowned, would have contributed much to the narrative. Then again, the mission of this exhibition made clear that the intention was not to provide a comprehensive history of visual arts from the region, but rather, offer new frameworks for looking at Latin American art.
The next case study comes from the second of two rotations realized for the exhibition El Dorado: Myths of Gold, presented by the Americas Society in New York in 2023 and 2024. This exhibition explored the legend of El Dorado as a foundational myth of the Americas, featuring artworks that ranged from the pre-Hispanic period to the present. It examined how this myth has influenced values like individualism, greed, and consumerism, showing works that challenged, reinforced, and questioned the continuity and the effects of the myth of El Dorado and the Americas.
While the exhibition mainly featured works of contemporary art, the pre-Hispanic and viceregal periods were well-represented. Here you see a wall of paintings, retablos, works on paper, and the portable altar at the center, all depicting either Marian devotions or interpretations of that genre, tied together by the presence of gold in their compositions. Here's another view of that wall, with the pair of works inside of that red rectangle that I want to draw your attention to.
And these are the work, Untitled: Study of Khani from the Disciples series by the contemporary artist Ebony K. Patterson, and an 18th century Cuzco School painting of Our Lady of La Antigua. The positioning of Patterson's work alongside Our Lady of La Antigua relies on visual cues to create connections between the two works.
Their interpretation, however, and by this I mean the labels, which were provided in laminated sheets that you could take with you around the space, does tremendous work of connecting these pieces to the overarching theme of the exhibition. But also, to each other, framing them as different manifestations from a lineage of religious painting, telling stories about gold with golden materials. In a space where several Marian devotions are readily available for further comparison, the juxtaposition offers a rich assemblage to gain insight from.
The last of these cross chronological installations that I'd like to highlight today is the very recently reopened American Art Galleries at the Brooklyn Museum, titled Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art. This permanent installation brings together over 400 works from the Brooklyn Museum's Art of the Americas collection, which spans 2000 years of history and represents the entire Western hemisphere. This installation shares many of the goals for amplifying marginalized perspectives, reframing what constitutes Latin American or American art that are outlined in the previous examples. One critical distinction in this installation is that it is grounded in Black feminist ideas and aesthetics, a lens through which the organizers aim to create spaces that cultivate belonging and hope for all audiences.
The pair of paintings that appear on a floating wall here in the gallery, titled To Give Flowers, was inspired by the adage, to give someone their flowers. In Black American funerary and gospel traditions, this saying encourages listeners to give praise to others while they're earthbound, rather than waiting until after someone's passing to share their appreciation. The unifying force in this gallery is actually aesthetic, sharing objects with floral patterns, used also as an entry point to highlight works of craft made by a diverse group of makers.
On the left appears a work made in 2022 by the artist Harmonia Rosales, titled Ori, a reference to the Yoruba concept of one's intuition and divine selfhood. Rosales imagines Ori as a Black woman, lying amidst a bed of flowers within a set of decorative rings, with creeping strangler figs encroaching on the space, all part of the rich symbolism present in this painting.
On the right, we see an 18th century Cuzco school representation of the Virgin of Pomata, flanked by images of St. Nicolas Tolentino and St. Rose of Lima. The interpretive text relays the importance of flowers in the composition as symbols of the Immaculate Conception, and in their use as adornments for Inca headdresses and canopies. The visual connections between Rosales's painting and the image of Our Lady of the Rosary of Pomata are clear, but what is lost is the greater context of the Pomata image's symbology, such as the pomegranate and the Christ child's hand, a symbol of the global Catholic Church, and the presence of these two saints of great importance to the Spanish viceroyalties at the bottom.
Before concluding, I would like to revisit Colonial Crossings and the temporal juxtapositions I began with, namely the trio of works featuring mothers and children. First, I'd like to look at the two-dimensional works in this grouping. The thematic parallels in this temporal juxtaposition are very clear. The mothers are both, of the [INAUDIBLE] Follower painting and Lamb's la Maternidad, are holding their children in a similar fashion. The differences in media and the vastly different chronologies are individually addressed in the wall text for both works, leaving the visitor to contemplate freely, aided also by comparative images of the Virgin on the surrounding walls.
The Gigante figure has a bigger burden to bear interpretively than the other works in this combination, as the pre-Hispanic material culture of the northern Andes isn't as widely represented in Americas collections, especially works that are [INAUDIBLE] objects, which are mentioned in the label for this object. The innovation of this approach is in the juxtaposition of three objects with a shared theme from vastly different chronologies. It offers the visitor a chance to reach across time in an organized vignette, rather than asking them to seek such juxtapositions in various spaces around an installation. I think this works because of its tight composition, its clear theme, and interpretation.
Lastly, before-- I'm going to ad lib a little bit, because I really wanted to include also these wonderful works of Salvador Santos, Nuestra Señora del Tránsito and Nuestra Reina de Paz, by Emily Hernandez. I just want to add a comment, because I find them very powerful and compelling. They truly fill a gap with works that will be recognizable to communities with parallel devotional figures.
In my case, I consider the challenges with finding images of 19th century saints from Argentina, El Gauchito Gil and the Difunta Correa, whose images appear widely throughout the interior provinces of Argentina, though not in formal art historical contexts. I believe that these kinds of contemporary interventions do tremendous work in bridging gaps between regions within Spanish-American art history that aren't fully represented in the canon possessed by museums with Spanish-American collections. And if you will note from my previous examples, most of them are Marian devotional images, so I think there's something there to be explored.
To conclude, exhibitions and installations have the power to capture an entire universe of ideas in a small space, narrated through the thoughtful assemblage of great works of art. What I hope has surfaced from this presentation, other than my observations, is the questioning of how displaying Spanish-American art alongside asynchronous works, though not infallible, aids us in the hard work of interpretation, revealing interesting patterns and bringing in new audiences to appreciate this genre. The intended purpose of using temporal juxtaposition of Spanish-American art is to ask big questions, encourage interdisciplinarity and inquiry of fields outside of one's own, and not to get lost in the minutiae.
A wonderful directive made by Claudia Brittenham of the University of Chicago, in a roundtable of scholars of pre-Hispanic art that was recently published, speaks-- or not so recently published, but speaks to this purpose. She suggests to her peers that they, and I quote, "need to be intelligible outside of our smallest and narrowest fields. We need to speak not just to other specialists, but to push out to bigger questions, to always answer the question, so what? The stakes are large.
What is art? How is it that we know what we know? What do you learn when you look? These are all questions that all art historians have to ask, and they are questions that we have opportunities to ask and answer in powerful ways. We have a lot to offer." End quote.
In a world where institutions of learning face irrelevance, and museums answer to merited calls to look inward at their colonial frameworks, and global perspectives on Latin American people and our cultures seem as essentialized as ever, I believe that asking these big questions and taking big risks, though always with a strong interpretation at the fore, is essential. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ANDY: Thank you so much. If we could have our final two speakers at the front here for Q&A and discussion, that would be wonderful. I'll bring the lights up a little bit. All right. Are there questions for our two final speakers? Why don't you--
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: I don't really have a question. I just have a comment about how I hadn't noticed how well done the exhibit here, what a great job it does of putting those three things together. Because in one of the other examples, the Virgin of the Rosary of-- I can't remember the name.
LUCIA ABRAMOVICH SANCHEZ: Pomata.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, Pomata, it really-- I'm a medievalist, so of course I feel like, oh, my God. It's just erasing all context for that piece of work. It's erasing the past, because it's just recontextualizing it in the present, forgetting anything that it is giving in its original context. While the three pieces that you showed from the exhibit right here, they don't do that. They don't erase each other.
They actually talk to each other and allow them to be in their period. I'm very impressed. I hadn't thought about that. Thank you for pointing that out, and I'm very impressed with you guys and your students for doing that.
It's amazing that such a-- what seems a simple curatorial decision can have such an impact. I'm going to think about these things more. So that was actually really fascinating. Thank you for pointing that out. I have no question.
ANDY: Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: Oh, sorry. Oh.
SPEAKER 2: Thank you. Thanks to you both for such incredible presentations and performances. And I think that, despite the wildly different themes that you are both covering in your work, there are-- I'm very grateful that we're closing this symposium with these two final presentations. I think my-- I'll have a question for Patricia, and another question also for Lucia.
For Patricia, I think-- I'm curious to hear your thoughts, especially having participated now in this symposium about further inroads between art history and musical history and composition. Because I think that music tends to be relatively ignored by art historians, despite so many similarities in terms of connections to Baroque and Rococo aesthetics, practices of copying and transcription, and imitation and adaptation.
So many of the same metaphors that we use for discussing the movement of motifs and ideas present in colonial visual culture also apply to music. So I'm curious to see where you see some of these collaborations. Where might there be more fruitful opportunities for some comparative study?
And then for Lucia, I was very curious to know how you might be addressing some of these questions in your own curatorial work at Boston, and how consideration of audience and demographics, and your work, both in the South, in the Southwest, and then now in the Northeast, how that also plays a role in some of the curatorial decisions that you have to make. And what you see as both the promises and perils of some of these transhistorical kinds of juxtapositions.
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yeah, no, thank you for that really, really great question and comments. I couldn't describe it any better, all the relationships that I see. I remember when I first saw this exhibition, that I was right away, really excited about all these possibilities and the many relationships that were seen already.
But then, when Andy very kindly showed me the exhibition privately and talked to me about the characteristics of the pictures and the objects, then I was like, all the time, I was having ideas right away. Oh, OK. This is like my research in this. Oh, this is like this manuscript. Oh, this is like the patronesses of-- everything was related. So as for where I see this happening, or more or better, where I would like to see this happening is, really, everywhere.
A museum, I've always felt that it's a great place, because it's halfway between an institution like a university and a public place, where people, like regular people, can meet. And I love the way, especially-- in many museums, but since we are here, I love the way this one displays, really, like a straightforward way of explaining things that is not missing any important content. But at the same time, it's accessible for every kind of audience, I feel.
And so yeah, I think museums have a lot of potential to display not only objects or paintings that are fixed, but also things that can happen, such as music or-- so that can happen temporarily, and then finish. But they can be very related, and it's just a different type of display. So it could be music, it could be dance, it could be other things. It's like, when you have these audiovisuals happening in museums, I always find these very, very interesting, like the way they combine.
And this relates also, like the juxtaposition of things. So yeah, I don't know if this replies, but honestly, libraries as well are a place that I feel that have a lot of potential to offer a combined approach to the objects of study, so-- but yeah.
LUCIA ABRAMOVICH SANCHEZ: Oh. Thank you for the question. So you wanted to know about how I would apply this concept at MFA. Well, I want to first say the disclaimer that these were just snippets in larger exhibitions, and I just tried to focus on moments that I thought would be interesting for this group to see. So there were certainly--
I really respect and admire all of the work that went into these projects, and I don't want it to seem that it was all-- there were a lot of really interesting moments. I guess, for the MFA-- so the MFA Boston's collection of Latin American art is very, very limited. There's a large amount of pre-Hispanic work, but there's only a little over 100 Latin American works, at least in the American Decorative Arts and Sculpture department.
So I have to rely on juxtapositions in order to do interesting displays. I actually thought about this a lot with Ellie's comment about the hemispheric comparisons that you made. I think that that is really we're trying to achieve, is to find those moments where there's an aesthetic, and also a good interpretive opportunity, like aesthetic connection, plus interpretive opportunity that we can parse out. But that really is the mandate, because more and more, I think the Department wants to incorporate Latin America into the larger North American collection.
The difference between that and the South is that, well, coming from San Antonio, that's one of the largest collections of Latin American art in the country, so-- and it's also a city that's, the majority is a Latino, Latina population, so it's very different in terms of that. So this is why I think about these things, is because it's out of a necessity. And I think a lot of institutions that aren't rich in these holdings have to find strategies to show these objects. The problem is getting that interpretive side out there so that specialists can go in and feel that the work has been given its due diligence, and that is where things get complicated.
ANDY: I want to add my congratulations to you both, to [INAUDIBLE] for such wonderful talks and talks which on the outside might seem to be very divergent and very different, but really actually, in my mind, hang together quite well in terms of the idea of temporality, of the fleeting moments in which music exists. But actually, the telescoping of time that you're talking about, where lessons from the distant past can be made relevant to the present moment. So I think it was actually a really great pairing.
I likewise have a question for each of you. In a more specific way, Patricia, I'm interested in so much of the history, and even in the gallery upstairs, so many of the pictures have to do with iterative types and copies and reinterpretations of previous types, which are well known. So I'm interested to what extent you could talk a little bit more about the manuscripts that you've been working with, and are they iteratively copied from other manuscript sources, or are they copied from printed music? And if, in that process, new and unexpected things start to happen, small changes to the musical notation that maybe reflect regional or historical changes in performance practice, and those kinds of things.
And then for you, Lucia, my question has to do more with-- it's along the same lines of [INAUDIBLE] question, but it has more to do with, I really liked about your talk, where you were very pointed to talk about the interpretive strategies that went along with the installation strategies. And how, in some cases, labels worked, a laminated card that you take around the gallery that worked, the role of catalog texts and things like that. And again, in your own practice, what are your favorite interpretive strategies, and how do you feel that those work? What do you espouse in trying to make points about this art from this time and part of the world?
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yeah, no. Thank you for that question, for giving me the chance of saying a little bit more. So there is a particular example that comes to mind that I didn't mention, just for the sake of time. But in the Minor manuscript, for example, there is also a Haydn sonata, supposedly a Haydn sonata, which is not recognized as a Haydn sonata at all by historians or musicologists, and probably is just a sonata the style of Haydn, who is also like-- even the name is written differently. It's without an H, so-- but probably, just to-- this is speculative, but perhaps they wanted to have one example, but they didn't have access to any printed manuscript.
So then, they made up one piece that could have been written by Haydn. This, of course, we cannot know, really, their reasoning behind it, but it seems a possibility, for example. But definitely, this happens throughout the history, and also in Europe. And especially--
And curiously enough, even more with printed music, because the fashions change, but they, many composers, keep-- or more than the composers, the consumers, the music consumers keep using music from the past. But they many times re-edit it, and this keeps happening, actually. And then they add the fashions of the time, so they just even change, literally change, the musical writing, the notation.
For example, in the romanticism in the 19th century, all the 18th century music that was really simple, very transparent, crystalline, they keep adding chords and all these sounds that the more powerful instruments can make. And they just rewrite them, just because of their taste. Now, with this movement of historical performance, we try to reconstruct the way it was in the past, by then looking into these manuscripts, which many times are not available.
But even in the trying of using the original sources, there is some interpretation. The movement that I showed on the screen, the only one I showed, with this kind of very, very difficult writing for our standards, I've already done some interpretation for sure, because some of the notes are erased. So you just have to guess by the kind of harmonies that your knowledge, your musical knowledge, allows you to decide and take a decision, actually, on what note that might have been.
And I've edited music from the past as well. And of course, like when you-- now, when you create an edition, you try to really detail everything that you've changed, and to just provide that information to the person who is going to read from that score, so it is clear that, for example, if I didn't see if one of the notes was erased, I'm putting the note back there, but I'm telling the audience, OK, this is my own interpretation.
So yeah, it keeps happening, really, and it's kind of difficult to control. And I guess it's just the natural way of music evolving with the time. So--
ANDY: Thank you.
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yeah.
LUCIA ABRAMOVICH SANCHEZ: Thanks for the question, Andy. So in terms of interpretive strategy, I think first and foremost, as important as labels are, and I think I pointed that out in my paper, I am a big proponent of the 80-word or less, or 100-word or less, if you really need to, chat label, which is the text next to the object we call a chat.
And that's because people don't really usually take the time to go into the-- even I don't do that going through museums. Oftentimes, I'll just take photos of a bunch of the labels and go back, just beca-- and I can't imagine, if this is my career, then what people do on an everyday basis. I think with the increasing, or the decreasing attention span of, just generally of our global populace, the incorporation of multi-sensory experiences, something we talked briefly about last night, is going to be very important.
But that also gives access to people. It's not just about attention span. It's about incorporating the other senses, whether that be audio visual, whether that be tactile. I have a long-standing dream of some sort of olfactive thing going on in Spanish Americas. I'm speaking it into existence, in Spanish Americas installations are so important. But the--
Yeah, those are just things in the galleries that are sort of static in a way, that you don't need interventions of personnel. I find that tours and things like that are one of the best ways to get people engaged. But those are my bullet points of strategies that I'd like to see, or I'd like to do myself.
ANDY: Thank you so much. Are there other questions, or do we have any questions from the audience?
SPEAKER 3: Yes. Well, actually, it's just to say thank you for a great panel. You both touched on-- Lucia, you talked about an issue that I think everywhere, all museums are considering it, for many years now, how to make things relevant. In academia too, we need to figure out what to do. People are reading less, everywhere. So thank you.
And Patricia, I wanted to ask. Thank you for regaling us with that, with your art. Did you go to the Early Modern Sound conference in The Clark last year? Because I think that's where your work fits in. They did-- hearing you talk about how women were margin-- they could write pieces, and you'd never know today that they wrote it. And seeing you in that fortepiano, pianoforte?
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Both.
SPEAKER 3: Just embodying that, it's really exciting. And so at that conference, there was this scholar, Mary Caton Ling, I want to say, who worked with Hans Sloane's 1707 book, The Natural History of Jamaica. And in that book, there is musical notations that he-- it's just like one or two pages in a huge book that's mostly about botanicals and all that.
And it's about-- and these musical notations are enslaved people that had gone through the middle passage, and he noted down their music and the instruments that they were playing and the innovations that they were doing. And she had them, Mary Caton, the scholar, she got a group together. And in Jamaica, had people, locals, perform this music. So for the first time, that music was brought to life.
And she played-- I'll share with you the project, because it's digital. But it was so electrifying to see that come alive. And I'm not sure what the stakes are and-- we're resurrecting that, reclaiming it. I'm not sure where this fits that we're doing, but it is a field that is very, very exciting. So thank you.
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yeah, no. Thank you so much. And if-- yeah, I would love to have more information about that, definitely. Yes, yes. There are many, many other manuscripts that need to, or that could be interesting sources of study, really. Yeah, if-- yeah, please share it.
SPEAKER 4: Before I forget, there's also, this spring, at the Huntington, a conference on Early Modern Music, and it's being led by Cesar Favila, who's at UCLA, and he's a Colonial Latin American conventual music scholar. And so that's going to be a major focus of that conference, is sound in the viceregal period.
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Thank you. OK.
SPEAKER 5: [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER 6: Hi. Thank you both. That was wonderful. Patricia, I have both a really, really practical question for you, but then also just one that piqued my curiosity as you were talking. So when you were playing, can you tell us what you were doing to produce such very different textures?
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yes, absolutely. So I'm just going to demonstrate one more time.
SPEAKER 6: Yeah.
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yeah, I was playing and I was thinking at the same time, I should stop and say-- and then I'm like, mm, I don't know. Maybe later.
[LAUGHTER]
But thank you for bringing this up. So, OK. The only one I explained, I think, is the very beginning. There are hand stops here that I pull down. I need my other hand. Sorry. Now I'll break it. So I just pull this out, right?
[PLAYS NOTES]
These are the ones that maintain the sound, the ones that are here. Oh, thank you so much. Next to the keyboard, right? Then, when I pull them down--
[PLAYS NOTES]
Oh, sorry. It's not working. No when I pull them up, actually, then all the dampers, the part of the mechanism that stops the strings from vibrating, go down. And then I can play just one note at a time--
[PLAYS TWO NOTES]
--instead of holding the sound. The other one, the one of the harpsichord sound, it's right here, next to the strings. And so I move these levers up, and then there is a piece of bone that go-- it's a flat, very thin piece of this material, which goes in between the strings and the hammers. So the hammers don't hit the strings directly, but that piece. And then it sounds like this.
[PLAYS LESS RESONANT NOTES]
And this is a very relevant sound, and this is why I wanted to bring this instrument, because it's like a sound of a past, really. By the time of a music that I was playing, it was written, by the time it was written, in the rest of Europe, the harpsichord, it still existed, but people were really enthusiastic with the piano, and not with the harpsichord anymore. But in the colonies, we still find this.
And in Spain, as well, because of probably the lagging behind because of the very strong religious influences. Many music still is written for the harpsichord. So these pianos-- well, this piano is very early for that music, actually, if you think about it, because this is 1749. But the music I was playing is about 1790 and 1802, or things like that.
But I chose it on purpose, because it shows a little bit like this coexistence between the harpsichord and the piano that was quite late. And then finally, the other thing I did is moving the whole keyboard. And this was in the Bartolomeo Cristofori, the inventor of a piano action, already.
I moved the whole keyboard, just a tiny, like one inch or less, to the left, and then the hammers hit just one string out of two. Each key has two strings attached, tuned to the same note to produce a bigger sound. But when I do this, it only hits one. Then, the sound is softer.
[PLAYS NOTES]
Oh, sorry. If I remove this one, you'll hear it better.
[PLAYS NOTES]
And this is just, yeah, that mechanism that moves the whole action to the left so it hits only one. It has something else, actually. This is like a machine. So it has-- if I remove one of these bolts here, then I can move the whole keyboard a little farther. I'm going to play a C, OK?
[PLAYS C]
This is C. Now I move it.
[THUMP]
[PLAYS FLATTER NOTE]
And this is C, still. So this is a transposing option that they had, because many of the instruments, like wind instruments were not transposable at the time. So for playing with other people, that was the main function of a piano when it was first invented, because it could change the sound according to the needs of maybe the other instrumentalists or singers. Then, they could just transpose it without having to change the music, so this was very, very convenient. So I think this was everything.
SPEAKER 6: That's wonderful. Thanks so much.
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yeah.
SPEAKER 6: The other question I have is a little more speculative. I was really-- I found it really wonderful to hear you talking about, and to be thinking about women in the music world and in relationship to status and issues like that. And I was thinking about that in relationship to some of the different images you were showing, and I was really struck, because I so associate the music in the park kind of scene, right?
The party, with moralizing traditions, like music as licentiousness and music as from the Garden of Sin kind of thing, that there's such a sort of scandalous tradition of some of those musical scenes. And then to see the jux-- and so when I've looked at the biombos, I think of them in that tradition more. And then you were talking about music in relationship to status, and it was much more about proper upbringing. And so I don't know if that's something you've thought at all about, the tensions between the interesting, shady side of music and the upright side of music, and how that plays out.
PATRICIA GARCIA GIL: Yeah, no, for sure. So yeah, that kind of place would have been, yes, as you said, a mix of things going on. That particular [? salon ?] kind of thing was still considered for the people who were good, like good people.
But there are other situations outdoors, but also, indoors. I was talking to Juliana yesterday, and there was this situation where music happening at home, where these people, it was typical to have a little altar, and they would meet for praying, theoretically. But then, there would be music and it would become a party. And this was also another place where it wasn't very well-understood if it was good or not.
Because on one hand, you're praying, so that is good. On the other hand, you're not going to church, because you have the altar, so you are not going. That's not good. And then on the other hand, you're also playing music. It becomes a wild party. Who knows? So that's not good, either.
So there is a lot of mix, I think, in many different situations of how things are well seen, but also, they allow-- they have room for more than that. And of course, there's a lot of, I think, research that can be done on that, and to see to what extent these places where-- I suppose it would depend on the particular place, even sometimes, or the people who were judging it.
But yeah, it's very interesting. It's like this combination. And it's the same as the compilations that I was showing. Like the music they contain is a mix of religious, but also not. But also, even some of the non-religious ones have a lot of connotations from religion.
Like the very last thing that I was playing, not the very, very last movement, but the one before, the one that I played very soft, that is, to me, it's very-- it reminds me a lot to the elevation toccatas, the organ elevation toccatas that were played during the services when Jesus goes down the cross, because it has the same musical gestures. That would be like another complete talk on the symbolism in the music. But yeah, I think it's like, everything meets. So--
ANDY: Perhaps one final question, if there is one, or--
SPEAKER 7: I'll relay one to you.
ANDY: Do you need a mic?
SPEAKER 7: Yeah.
ANDY: Thanks, Ashley.
SPEAKER 7: I wanted to relay a question by Rosario Granados for Lucia. And she asks, what do you think will be the effect of contextualizing a Juan Correa that's now part of the National Gallery collection within the global 17th century? [LAUGHS]
LUCIA ABRAMOVICH SANCHEZ: Hi, Rosario.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you for tuning in. Oh, that's so-- oh, that's such a big question. So many of you might know that the National Gallery of Art acquired its first piece of work from the Spanish Americas recently, a painting of the flagellation of Christ by Juan Correa.
To be honest with you, I'm not familiar enough with their Spanish art collection, which I assume is where they're going to be contextualizing this work, to give you an in-depth answer. But I will say that they don't-- the National Gallery of Art doesn't have, really-- like I just said, their first work of Spanish-American art. And so I think, much like other, larger institutions that have started collecting, or have amassed a collection of work of Spanish-American art, their first foray will involve putting it in context with European painting.
This raises another interesting question about temporal juxtapositions and these hierarchies of Spanish-American art. I didn't include a single work of decorative art from the Spanish Americas, and that's because these temporal juxtapositions just aren't as common. Those works, other than like--
I think you could see, Ilona has done tremendous work in incorporating that genre, and other colleagues have done the same. Rosario's wonderful Painted Cloth exhibition is a great example, too. But without enough examples, it's really difficult. So that's the long-winded answer to--
It's, I'm assuming they're going to just put it in a gallery with other Spanish and possibly Italian paintings, and that's a good start. If that's where you're starting, then that's where you're starting. And I'm just so happy that they're starting to collect in this genre. It's going to be great to see Latin American art on the Mall.
SPEAKER 7: And I think there might be a few in the Q&A that they would-- if there are any. I'm not sure.
ANDY: Yeah, there are two in the chat.
SPEAKER 7: OK I just can't see those, but I think they'll-- he'll project them on the screen.
ANDY: Here we go. OK, I'll read this out for people who are listening. Oh, let's see where it-- OK. For Lucia, could you comment on the risks of creating vignettes that are fundamentally formal when putting together works across time? If institutions are facing irrelevance, are facile juxtapositions contributing to eliding their educational role?
LUCIA ABRAMOVICH SANCHEZ: Hi, Ilona. All of my heroes of Spanish American art asking questions. It's great, but-- so I do think that that risk is very real, and I think that some of the examples touch upon that, the risk of collapsing important narratives when making these juxtapositions. I'm trying to remember the whole framing of the question.
But I guess my thought is, I'm trying to find ways to thoughtfully present this work in environments where there isn't a corpus that's rich enough to give you the full context of the work. And the demands of your colleagues, who are not experts in the material, are constantly there, so that you have to try to find a way to bring these objects to light, using the tools that you have on hand.
I think I focus a lot on contemporary work, because it's where I see the most common juxtapositions taking place. And I do think that there are risks there, because sometimes, contemporary artists are just taking aesthetic influence and not necessarily delving deeper, and there's no need for them to do that. If that's their practice, then that's their practice.
So yeah, the other side of this, I guess I would say, is that there's a larger body of work, of pre-Hispanic works, that we've all kind of touched upon throughout this past group of-- or it's been kind of touched upon. I think of Maya's paper, for example. And I initially was going to start this presentation with a look into Contested Visions, because I think that that was a really remarkable use of temporal juxtapositions, but with a large incorporation of work of pre-Hispanic art that spoke directly to the theme of the exhibition and made clear ties to the rest of the works in that installation.
But it didn't really fit within the mold of this, because I'm looking at these vignettes that I've seen in these larger projects. So that really was like a whole concept, where temporal juxtapositions were really fleshed out. So the short answer is yes, but it's like, I think I'm just trying to find ways, and be in dialogue with colleagues in the field, to see what the best way forward is, with what we have. So--
ANDY: All right. Thank you. Well, I think, then, I have the honor of closing today's proceedings and thanking you all for being here. Of course, our distinguished speakers, thank you so much. Our other guests for the wonderful questions, comments, and the really stimulating and enlightening dialogue that you've brought together today.
I want to thank the team here at the Johnson Museum, especially Elizabeth Saggese, who is our main logistics person for travel and making sure everything ran smoothly today. Our building staff, our IT people, our students and interns who helped run things today. And thank you all again so very much.
[APPLAUSE]
At this symposium, presented in conjunction with the Johnson Museum of Art exhibition “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas,” established scholars whose work encompasses a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history offer new methodologies seeking to expand the boundaries of this visual culture. The symposium was made possible through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.
The third and final session, “Temporal Interventions: The Spanish Colonial World through Musical Heritage and Asynchronous Juxtapositions” was moderated by Andrew C. Weislogel, Johnson Museum.
Presentations at the second session were “Voices of Influence: Exploring Power Dynamics in the Conservation of Musical Heritage in Colonial Latin America” with fortepiano performance by Patricia García Gil (Cornell University); and “Time-Warping the Museum: Temporal Juxtapositions in Displays of Spanish Colonial Art,” Lucía Abramovich Sánchez (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
