Paul Niell
Biographic Data
| ID | 1360947 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Niell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Niell |
| SIGNATURE | NIELL P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2200-0549 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Grounds of Conflict
Since colonial times, natural resources in the Americas have allowed for a new energetic pattern of rationalized extraction to emerge globally. During the nineteenth century, as Latin American independent nations began to emerge, nature was a key focus of the local societies: debates on national identity, energy, agriculture, economy, progress, and civilization all revolved around the management of the environment. Colonial traditions of extracti…
Designed Segregation
In the 1840s, San Juan, Puerto Rico witnessed the construction of an institutional building dedicated to “beneficencia” (social welfare)—the Casa de Beneficencia. This facility sheltered a diverse population, including orphaned children, women, the mentally ill, and the unhoused. An early plan of the architectural complex by Spanish engineer Santiago Cortijo reveals a design emphasizing bilateral symmetry, clear spatial organization, and function…
Sacred Pathway, Devotional Praxis
The ferry from Havana to Regla, Cuba, transports visitors from today's cruise ship docks across a brief stretch of water in about 20 min. Despite its brevity, this watery passage symbolically foregrounds the Marian devotion on the southern rim of the grand harbor. In this way, water conjoins African diasporic histories of enslavement, labor, survival, resistance, daily life, and religiosity within Havana Bay, into which two urban geographies proj…
Santo Domingo
Curating the Caribbean
In this paper, we consider the material and visual implications of coloniality – the darker side of modernity, and structure of management that underpins and supports modernity’s rhetoric of promises – within the circum-Caribbean through a reflection on curating the exhibition Decolonising Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. By juxtaposing the recent work of Haitian-born American painter and sculptor Edouard Duva…
Latin American art academies
Campeche y Jordán, José
Campeche y Jordán, José
Caribbean art and architecture under Spanish colonial rule (1492–1898)
Fabregat, José Joaquín
History painting in Latin America
Vermay, Jean-Baptiste
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment
The new monograph by Kelly Donahue-Wallace on Spanish engraver Jeronimo Antonio Gil (1731–1798) presents a richly documented account of the artist’s professional life in the late Spanish empire fro
A ntonio U rquízar -H errera . Admiration and Awe
The cities of Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, and Granada have long been known for the cultural complexity of their urban landscapes. The material culture of three dominant religions in medieval Iberia, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity commingled extensively and largely in religious spaces. After 1492, with the expulsion of the Nasrids, the last remaining Islamic polity on the peninsula, the Christian monarchs Isabel I and Ferdinand II declared Christi…
Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba
According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island's first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana's central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Arm…
Late Gothic in the sixteenth-century Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Architecture of Colonizers/Architecture of Immigrants
Foundational Arts
Schuessler, Michael K. (2013) Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain, The University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), xi + 224 pp. $50.00 hbk. In recent years, scholars from multiple disciplines have examined the sixteenth-century visual arts, architecture, space and performances employed by the Spanish friars and created in the so-called New World for the purpose of controlling, exploiting and converting indigenous p…
Neoclassical Architecture in Spanish Colonial America
The neoclassical style in Spanish Colonial architecture in the Americas emerged in the late 18th century under the impact of the reforms of the Bourbon monarchy. While subdued ornament, strict geometry, and Greco‐Roman revival motifs characterize this style internationally, few studies examine neoclassical architecture's translation in the Spanish Americas. Scholars such as Manuel Toussaint, George Kubler, and Jean Charlot have associated the Roy…
Founding the Academy of San Alejandro and the Politics of Taste in Late Colonial Havana, Cuba
The founding of Havana's fine arts academy of San Alejandro in 1818, initially as a school for instruction in drawing, was modeled upon strategies by the Spanish monarchy to establish art academies and drawing schools for the cultural improvement of the empire. Sponsored by Spanish Intendant Alejandro Ramírez and the city's Royal Economic Society of the Friends of the Country, the opening of the Havana academy coincided with the island's escalati…
El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism
In this article I explore the production and reception of El Templete, a nineteenth-century memorial erected to commemorate the founding of Havana. This symbolically rich monument participates in the aesthetic traditions of architecture, sculpture and painting, and is a paradigmatic example of the multivalence of public, monumental art in the late colonial classicism of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than representing strictly an aesthet…
Dominican Republic
Curating the Caribbean
In this paper, we consider the material and visual implications of coloniality – the darker side of modernity, and structure of management that underpins and supports modernity’s rhetoric of promises – within the circum-Caribbean through a reflection on curating the exhibition Decolonising Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. By juxtaposing the recent work of Haitian-born American painter and sculptor Edouard Duva…
Founding the Academy of San Alejandro and the Politics of Taste in Late Colonial Havana, Cuba
The founding of Havana's fine arts academy of San Alejandro in 1818, initially as a school for instruction in drawing, was modeled upon strategies by the Spanish monarchy to establish art academies and drawing schools for the cultural improvement of the empire. Sponsored by Spanish Intendant Alejandro Ramírez and the city's Royal Economic Society of the Friends of the Country, the opening of the Havana academy coincided with the island's escalati…
El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism
In this article I explore the production and reception of El Templete, a nineteenth-century memorial erected to commemorate the founding of Havana. This symbolically rich monument participates in the aesthetic traditions of architecture, sculpture and painting, and is a paradigmatic example of the multivalence of public, monumental art in the late colonial classicism of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than representing strictly an aesthet…
Dominican Republic
El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism
In this article I explore the production and reception of El Templete, a nineteenth-century memorial erected to commemorate the founding of Havana. This symbolically rich monument participates in the aesthetic traditions of architecture, sculpture and painting, and is a paradigmatic example of the multivalence of public, monumental art in the late colonial classicism of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than representing strictly an aesthet…
Founding the Academy of San Alejandro and the Politics of Taste in Late Colonial Havana, Cuba
The founding of Havana's fine arts academy of San Alejandro in 1818, initially as a school for instruction in drawing, was modeled upon strategies by the Spanish monarchy to establish art academies and drawing schools for the cultural improvement of the empire. Sponsored by Spanish Intendant Alejandro Ramírez and the city's Royal Economic Society of the Friends of the Country, the opening of the Havana academy coincided with the island's escalati…
Neoclassical Architecture in Spanish Colonial America
The neoclassical style in Spanish Colonial architecture in the Americas emerged in the late 18th century under the impact of the reforms of the Bourbon monarchy. While subdued ornament, strict geometry, and Greco‐Roman revival motifs characterize this style internationally, few studies examine neoclassical architecture's translation in the Spanish Americas. Scholars such as Manuel Toussaint, George Kubler, and Jean Charlot have associated the Roy…
Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba
According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island's first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana's central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Arm…
Late Gothic in the sixteenth-century Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Architecture of Colonizers/Architecture of Immigrants
Foundational Arts
Schuessler, Michael K. (2013) Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain, The University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), xi + 224 pp. $50.00 hbk. In recent years, scholars from multiple disciplines have examined the sixteenth-century visual arts, architecture, space and performances employed by the Spanish friars and created in the so-called New World for the purpose of controlling, exploiting and converting indigenous p…
Latin American art academies
Campeche y Jordán, José
Campeche y Jordán, José
Caribbean art and architecture under Spanish colonial rule (1492–1898)
Fabregat, José Joaquín
History painting in Latin America
Vermay, Jean-Baptiste
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment
The new monograph by Kelly Donahue-Wallace on Spanish engraver Jeronimo Antonio Gil (1731–1798) presents a richly documented account of the artist’s professional life in the late Spanish empire fro
A ntonio U rquízar -H errera . Admiration and Awe
The cities of Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, and Granada have long been known for the cultural complexity of their urban landscapes. The material culture of three dominant religions in medieval Iberia, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity commingled extensively and largely in religious spaces. After 1492, with the expulsion of the Nasrids, the last remaining Islamic polity on the peninsula, the Christian monarchs Isabel I and Ferdinand II declared Christi…
Curating the Caribbean
In this paper, we consider the material and visual implications of coloniality – the darker side of modernity, and structure of management that underpins and supports modernity’s rhetoric of promises – within the circum-Caribbean through a reflection on curating the exhibition Decolonising Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. By juxtaposing the recent work of Haitian-born American painter and sculptor Edouard Duva…
Santo Domingo
Sacred Pathway, Devotional Praxis
The ferry from Havana to Regla, Cuba, transports visitors from today's cruise ship docks across a brief stretch of water in about 20 min. Despite its brevity, this watery passage symbolically foregrounds the Marian devotion on the southern rim of the grand harbor. In this way, water conjoins African diasporic histories of enslavement, labor, survival, resistance, daily life, and religiosity within Havana Bay, into which two urban geographies proj…
Designed Segregation
In the 1840s, San Juan, Puerto Rico witnessed the construction of an institutional building dedicated to “beneficencia” (social welfare)—the Casa de Beneficencia. This facility sheltered a diverse population, including orphaned children, women, the mentally ill, and the unhoused. An early plan of the architectural complex by Spanish engineer Santiago Cortijo reveals a design emphasizing bilateral symmetry, clear spatial organization, and function…
Grounds of Conflict
Since colonial times, natural resources in the Americas have allowed for a new energetic pattern of rationalized extraction to emerge globally. During the nineteenth century, as Latin American independent nations began to emerge, nature was a key focus of the local societies: debates on national identity, energy, agriculture, economy, progress, and civilization all revolved around the management of the environment. Colonial traditions of extracti…
History (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Art history (7 works) · Colonialism (7 works) · Cuban History and Society (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Ancient history (6 works)