Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America

The seven diverse essays in this volume consider colonial Latin American art from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, focusing on New Spain and the Andes as well as Cuba. They explore various topics, from the modes and materials of artistic production to the legacies of image making and multiple applications of artistic expertise. Brought together by the coeditors’ introduction reflecting on the field and a conclusion coauthored by Barbara Mundy and Aaron Hyman, the chapters offer an ambitious rumination on approaches to producing art histories of colonial Latin America.The book is situated in conversation with Lettered Artists and the Languages of Empire: Painters and the Profession in Early Colonial Quito by Susan Verdi Webster (2017), to whom it is dedicated, and Mundy and Hyman's “Out of the Shadow of Vasari: Towards a New Model of the ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America” (2015). The authors took inspiration from Webster's groundbreaking archival research revealing artists in colonial Ecuador and Mundy and Hyman's call to move beyond old European models for formulating colonial Latin American art histories, wherein scholars describe the artist's biography in conjunction with their masterpieces. As Mundy and Hyman asserted in their 2015 article, because so much of the art made in Latin America during the colonial period looks like early modern European art, it has led scholars to expect scholarship on it to similarly follow European models. The authors of this volume sought to develop new approaches that embrace a “decolonial perspective” to “center . . . people that Western forms of knowledge obscure,” as the introduction strongly emphasizes (pp. 1–2).As Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt acknowledge in their introduction, the authors “rarely recur to the usual art historical methods of formal analysis and iconography” (p. 14). In fact, many of the artworks that the chapters examine—a portrait of Tupac Amaru, a Christ statue from Ixmiquilpan, a painting of the Virgin that Webster once suggested might be attributed to Mateo Mexía—are now lost or are primarily considered through textual sources. A consequence of moving away from habituated discussions of artists’ lives and oeuvres is that objects are discussed at something of an arm's length. Instead, the authors explore an expanded conceptualization of artists’ “work” that includes, for example, entrepreneurship and activism. This broader definition is eye-opening and very productive; but one form of “artwork” may not need to preclude the other.Another notable feature of the art examined by the chapters is the prevalence of European forms. Given Mundy and Hyman's above assertion—which actually characterizes only a subset of objects produced in Latin America during the colonial period—a decolonial approach might have foregrounded more Indigenous objects from the colonial period to center Indigenous artists and Indigenous artistic traditions. In the conclusion, Mundy and Hyman note that “this collection of essays primes our attention to the potential for art historical recovery of Indigenous presence and agency,” but scholars of pre-Columbian art have been engaged in this effort for some time (p. 234). Although colonial Indigenous objects are sometimes studied as an extension of pre-Columbian artifacts, one way to ensure that colonial Latin American art history is not a copy of European art history would be to holistically address all objects in circulation during the period, whether Indigenous, European, or otherwise.The volume engages more with the history side of art history. But rather than scouring archival sources to construct biographies of artists, the authors emphasize identity. In their conclusions, Mundy and Hyman also note this, characterizing it as a “clarion call” or “siren song” (pp. 229, 235–36). They also worry: “Will indigeneity be the only artistic experience that one is expected to account for in studying art produced in colonial Latin America?” (p. 234). But I find that this concern overlooks how multiple chapters critically attend to Afro-Latin American actors, most especially those chapters by Linda Marie Rodriguez, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, and Derek S. Burdette. Women, too, take center stage in Vargas-Betancourt's essay and appear in Cohen-Aponte's contribution. In my reading of the volume, I was impressed by how many different identities were surfaced from archival sources in spite of the historic erasures of nonwhite, nonmale subjects acknowledged by the introduction.Arguably, the highest praise for a scholarly work is that it starts a meaningful conversation. For me, reading this book prompted much introspection about the future of colonial Latin American art history—and I subsequently asked a colleague to read it so that we could discuss it. The book would assuredly foster productive debates in graduate seminars. Ultimately, it served to remind me of the losses of many key works of colonial Latin American art and the inherent biases and limitations of colonial archives. But, as for future directions of the field, the analysis of artworks is still art history's most unique contribution relative to other disciplines. And, in spite of losses, many colonial Latin American objects still exist that are ripe for study. This does not have to end in formal analysis or iconography. While archival sources may make it difficult to write more inclusive art histories, it is worth considering that objects themselves are a first-person testimony from their maker—as scholars of pre-Columbian art, who often grapple with an absence of archives, know well. The analysis of materials, facture, and techniques—topics that a few chapters actually examine through archival sources—might offer additional ways of modeling colonial artists in scholarship, of understanding their biography through evidence of training or artistic choices, and of exploring their identities through the cultural knowledge that their works evince

Agency (philosophy) · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Citation · Colonialism · Creativity · Icon · Library science · Media studies · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law