Exhibition at LACMA challenges stereotypes about indigenous cultures in the colonial world

The exhibition offers a comparative view of Mexico and Peru, the two principal viceroyalties of Spanish America, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and includes a selection of approximately 200 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, codices, manuscripts, queros (ceremonial drinking vessels), featherworks, and other extraordinary objects.
“This exhibition, which brings together a remarkable group of artworks from Mexico and Peru (two areas which were much larger than the countries known by those names today), provides a unique opportunity to examine the connection between ancient and colonial artistic traditions,” said Ilona Katzew, exhibition curator and department head of Latin American art.
“By taking into consideration the pre-Columbian (Inca and Aztec) origins of these two regions and their continuities and ruptures over time, Contested Visions greatly enriches our understanding of how art and power intersected in the Spanish colonial world.”
There has been—and to a certain degree there still is—a tendency to romanticize the Aztec and Inca empires as formidable entities that were vanquished by the Spaniards. The relationship between the indigenous peoples and nonnatives (Spanish invaders and other groups), however, was much more complex. Although the Spaniards referred to the native peoples of the Americas generically as “Indians,” (the Americas were called “las Indias” because Columbus initially thought that he had sailed to the Indian Subcontinent), these groups were not unified and did not share a common identity but instead identified with their ethnic states and ancestral roots. Their relationship to the conquerors cannot be reduced to one of victors and vanquished; it entailed a delicate process of cultural negotiation, mutual accommodation, and exchange, a dynamic that gave rise to vital works of art, rich in interpretative possibilities.
Exhibition Organization
The exhibition is organized into six broad sections. The first section, Tenochtitlan and Cuzco: Pre-Columbian Antecedents, brings together monumental sculpture for the Aztecs and textiles, feather and metalwork for the Inca, and presents key concepts integral to each society’s political and ideological structure that lays the foundation for understanding the role that indigenous artistic traditions played in colonial times.
The second section, Ancient Styles in the New Era, shows how pre-Hispanic styles and materials (e.g., textiles in Peru and featherworks in Mexico) continued in colonial times and were adapted to the creation of exquisite Christian objects.
The third section, Conquest and New World Orders, explores the depiction of the Spanish conquest in codices, paintings, and folding screens, and offers a three-fold perspective of this pivotal moment by Spaniards, Creoles (Spaniards born in the Americas), and Amerindians, showing the different and competing memories of this event.
The fourth section, The Devotional Landscape and the Indian as Good Christian, investigates the role of converted Indians in the creation of a uniquely Mexican and Andean religious pantheon, and their role in the invention of new devotions. Among the most noteworthy is the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, but there is a host of lesser-known images that are also included. The fifth section is titled Indian Festivals and Sacred Rituals. To sustain its power, the Spanish monarchy allowed the continuation of ancient traditions—such as dances and other festive rites—whenever they were incorporated into Christian rituals, and native groups resorted to their past to proclaim their rights as a polity. Depictions of Indian weddings, with all their festive paraphernalia, offer a brilliant glimpse into the topic.
The last section addresses the subject of Memory, Genealogy, and Land. During the conquest of Mexico, for example, indigenous groups formed alliances with the Spaniards to overthrow the Aztecs, which led to the concession of certain privileges. A series of paintings and illustrated manuscripts (e.g., techialoyans and lienzos), shows the need of the native communities to generate genealogies to retain their power. In Peru the indigenous elite also commissioned lavish pictorial genealogies of the Inca rulers to preserve their memory and stake out their place under Spanish rule and during the Republican period.
The companion book, edited by Ilona Katzew, includes contributions by a distinguished group of scholars, including Cecelia F. Klein, Thomas B. F. Cummins, Diana Magaloni Kerpel, Kevin Terraciano, and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden among others. The book is produced by LACMA and distributed by the prestigious publisher Yale University Press.

After the exhibition closes at LACMA in late January, it will travel to the Museo Nacional de Historia (Castillo de Chapultepec), Mexico City, from July 6, 2012 through October 7, 2012.