Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Margarita Vargas-Betancourt

• Publisher: University of Florida Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781683403661, 9781683403524
• eBook ISBN: 9781683403784
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Rethinking the role of the artist and recovering the work of unacknowledged creators in colonial society

 

This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.

 

Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.

 

Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.

Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt

 

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Artists as Agents beyond the Frame
• 2. Artists as Activists: The Development of Indigenous Artists’ Rights during the Sixteenth Century
• 3. Indigenous Artistic Practice and Collaboration at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Mexico City (1536–1575)
• 4. The Pochtecatl Angelina Martina: Supplying Mexico City’s Art World in the Sixteenth Century
• 5. The Power of Expertise: Artists as Arbiters of the Miraculous in New Spain
• 6. The Brush and the Burin: Copies, Originals, and True Portraits in Juan María de Guevara y Cantos’s Corona de la divinissima María (Lima, 1644)
• 7. Art-Making and Art-Breaking in the Era of Andean Insurgencies
• 8. Paint and Poison: Black Artists and Elite Anxieties in Eighteenth-Century Havana
• 9. Conclusion: Artistic Presences in Colonial Latin America
• List of Contributors
• Index