From music videos, to SNL, to “Catholic Mexican Girl-Core” on high-fashion runways, the art and visual culture of colonial Latin America has made its way into the US mainstream. Is this a win for Latin America and its diaspora, or a romanticization of a violent period of history?

Ximena Gómez will explore the use of colonial imagery in contemporary popular media, focusing especially on Rosalía’s El Mal Querer (2018), to make a case for why it is more important than ever to know colonial Latin American art and its history.

Gómez is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a specialist in the visual culture of colonial Latin America, with a focus on the roles Indigenous and Black people played in artistic and religious expression in Lima, Peru, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This talk, which is cosponsored by the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies, will preview some of the themes to be explored in the upcoming exhibition Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas.

Above, at left: Unidentified workshop, Peru. Our Lady of Cocharcas (detail), 1751. Oil and gold on canvas. Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, 2011.040; at right: Filip Custic, cover for Rosalía’s El Mal Querer (detail), 2018