ARTH 398 Special Topics in Art & Society: Colonial Latin America

• Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:45 am-14:15 pm
• Online: Access through Moodle
• Instructor: Daniel Santiago Sáenz 

The so-called “global turn” in art history has led to an increasing interest in the artistic production of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. This period encompasses the beginning of European colonial projects, marked by the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the continent in 1492 and the Fall of México-Tenochtitlan in 1521, up to the wars of independence in the mid-nineteenth century. This course, designed as a thematic survey, introduces students to the broad sweep of artistic production in the Iberian Americas, with a particular emphasis on New Spain (a territory known today as Mexico). Our primary concern will be how colonial Latin American society is imagined and imaged in the larger context of Iberian imperial projects through the production and circulation of codices, feather mosaics, paintings, treatises, and sculptures. Acknowledging that invasion is a structure—both historical and ongoing—and not an event, we will examine the complex relationships between artistic production and conquest-settlement-colonialism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America. Moving beyond the misguided assumption that the arts of the so-called ‘New’ World represent little more than an imitation of European ‘originals,’ we will think about the cross-pollination between artistic practices and objects on both sides of the Atlantic.

We begin our journey with an art-historical “boot camp” aimed at introducing students to ways of thinking, reading, and writing about visual culture. We will then consider pre-Hispanic artistic practices, such as Mesoamerican mural painting, amantecayotl (Nahua feather mosaics) and the work of tlacuiloli (Indigenous painter-scribes). We will then examine selected aspects of artistic production in colonial Latin America, including issues of conversion and martyrdom, gender and sexuality, the representation of race in early Mexican manuscripts and in casta paintings, issues of mapping and territoriality, inventories and the circulation of objects, and the development of an art history of the universal. Towards the end of the semester, we will briefly examine contemporary engagements with the legacies of colonialism in Latin America and beyond.