In this beautifully illustrated volume, an international group of scholars present recent research on the movement of goods, art, and artists - and the circulation of ideas and ideologies - that shaped culture in Spanish America from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century. Their essays, now revised and expanded, were originally presented in 2016 at the annual symposium of the Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum, organized by Jorge Rivas Perez.
Monica Dominguez Torres (University of Delaware) opens the volume by examining the early modern pearl industry and trade in post-conquest Spanish America, and the history of the short-lived town of Nueva Cadiz de Cubagua, off the coast of Venezuela. Gustavo Curiel (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) discusses issues of reception, adoption, and transformation of European print sources in the local production of furniture in the village of San Ildefonso Villa Alta in Oaxaca, Mexico. Esteban Garcia Brosseau (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) explores cultural and artistic exchanges between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Spanish America.
Constanza Toquica (Museo Colonial, Bogota) comments on the roles of specific images and iconographies, and their contribution to the construction of the colonial order in the viceroyalty of New Granada. Rosario Ines Granados-Salinas (Blanton Museum of Art, Austin) explores the use of devotional images as rhetorical devices in Spanish colonial paintings. Rachael Zimmerman (University of Delaware) discusses the use of hammocks as an honorary mode of transportation in colonial Brazil.
Idurre Alonso (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles) discusses the never-realized city of Ville du Port de Napoleon (1807) in Hispaniola as a model where French and Spanish city planning models intersect. Natalia Majluf (Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru) focuses on the work of Peruvian portraitist of African descent Jose Gil de Castro (1785-c. 1841), a key figure in the rejuvenation of the arts during the years immediately following the independence of Peru.
