“Beyond European Palettes: The Overlooked Contributions of Indigenized Artists in the Historiography of Painting in Mexico”
In this talk, Emmanuel Ortega analyzes the genealogy of the nomenclature involved in art history’s considerations of indigenized forms of art and the erasure of over five hundred years of influence to better articulate the processes that minoritized Native peoples suffered throughout the colonial period. Understanding the history of Spanish colonial art and its byproducts in Mexican culture requires reconsideration of almost two centuries of scholarly questions that have exacerbated art’s role as an agent of Mexican social stratification. The entanglement between empire and art history, he proposes, exhorts us to implicate the cultural interlocutors that exemplify such divisions.
Emmanuel Ortega is a Curator, the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library (2023–2024). Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, ex-votos, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. His recently curated art show titled “Contemporary Ex-Votos Devotion Beyond Medium” produced an accompanying catalog published by the New Mexico State University Art Museum this spring. An essay titled “Beyond European Palettes: The Overlooked Contributions of Indigenized Artists in the Historiography of Painting in Mexico.” will appear this fall as part of the Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Aesthetics and Imperialism, 1800-1950. His book Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Department of Romance Studies.
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Contact: Maggie Cao, mmcao@unc.edu
Image: Frida Kahlo, The Frame, 1938, oil on aluminum, under glass and painted wood, 28.5 x 20.7 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, JP929P, photo by Jean-Claude Planchet