In the Bartels Gallery, Floor 1L
This exhibition offers a dazzling introduction to the cultural complexity and myriad themes of colonial Latin American art made between approximately 1600 and 1850, situating visual culture at the dynamic crossroads of economic trade, religious conversion, and political transformation. The first exhibition of colonial Latin American art at Cornell, Colonial Crossings is conceived to bring the artistic traditions of Latin America to a broad viewership.
Colonial Crossings will also place colonial Latin American art in dialogue with relevant contemporary themes, including colonial constructions of race and class, the intersections of art and revolution, the visualization of gendered and religious identities, and the ongoing role of colonial Latin American aesthetics in contemporary Latinx art. Research into the imagery of these works, as well as the materials and practices employed in their making, will shed light on the complex moment from which they sprang, addressing questions of Indigenous and Afro-Latin American visibility and erasure, devotional pluralism, and resistance and revolution.
The exhibition is centered around the loan of twenty-four pictures from the Thoma Foundation collection, whose strengths in the Andes and the Hispanophone Caribbean will be supplemented with institutional and other loans of colonial artworks in various media from Mexico, Central America, and the US Southwest, to enable a wide-ranging picture of the arts of the Spanish Americas.
Colonial Crossings is co-curated by Dr. Andrew C. Weislogel, Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Johnson Museum, and Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell University.
The exhibition has been made possible in part through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and supported by an endowment in memory of Elizabeth Miller Francis ’47.