Mayer Center for Ancient American & Latin American Art

11/06/2018

06/29/2018

Announcing the 18th Annual Mayer Center Symposium
Materiality: Making Spanish America
November 1–2, 2018
Sharp Auditorium (Hamilton Building), Denver Art Museum

Sponsored by the Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum
Organized by Dr. Jorge Rivas, Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum

During the early modern period in Spanish America, artists and craftspeople experimented with a variety of local natural resources and imported materials—pigments, fibers, feathers, shell, stone, wood, clay, silver, gold—which resulted in a new and unique visual culture. This symposium will bring together an international group of scholars to explore topics central to the formation and evolution of materiality in the Spanish Americas.

Purchase tickets now using this link at https://tickets.denverartmuseum.org/DateSelection.aspx?item=1942

Keynote Address followed by a reception, November 1, 6PM (doors open at 5:30PM)
Thomas B.F. Cummins (Harvard U.)
Seeing is Believing
The Miracle of Colonial Native Artists, their Works, & their Materials

Lectures, November 2, 9:30AM-5PM (doors open at 9AM)
Sabena Kull (U. of Delaware & Mayer Fellow, DAM)
Literacies Sewn in Silk: Embroidered Samplers & Female Education in the Spanish World
Emmanuel Ortega (U. of Illinois at Chicago)
Consuming the Host: The Materiality of Franciscan Anxiety in 18th Century New Spain
Donna Pierce (Former Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art, DAM)
Material Matters: Global Trade at the Edges of the Spanish Colonial Empire
Rafael Ramos Sosa (U. de Sevilla)
Sculpture at Home in Baroque Lima
María Paola Rodríguez Prada (Museo Nacional de Colombia)
Ammonites, Gourds, Watercolors & Lithograph Prints: Scientific Objects & Images for a Cultural History
Olaya Sanfuentes (U. Católica de Chile)
Collect, Create & Send: The objects in the Index of Archbishop of Trujillo, Martínez Castellón
Gabriela Siracusano (U. Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires)
Materiality Between Mind & Hands: Some Approaches to Native Creativity in Colonial South America
Jonathan Tavares (The Art Institute Of Chicago)
Arming the New World: The Material Culture of Conflict in New Spain 1500-1800
Antonio Urquízar Herrera (U. Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid)
American Objects in 16th Century Castilian Households

Admission fee for the Materiality symposium
$20 Students, $75 Alianza Members, $80 DAM Member, $85 Other.
Please register using the above link. Look for a postcard mailing late summer. Email [email protected] to be put on our email and snail mail list.

During the early modern period in Spanish America, artists and craftspeople experimented with a variety of local natural resources and imported materials—pigments, fibers, feathers, shell, stone, wood, clay, silver, gold—which resulted in a new and unique visual culture. This symposium will brin...

06/29/2018

05/19/2017

Announcing the 17th Annual Mayer Center Symposium
Murals of the Americas
November 2–4, 2017
Sharp Auditorium (Hamilton Building), Denver Art Museum

Organized by Dr. Victoria I. Lyall, Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Pre-Columbian Art, Denver Art Museum
Sponsored by the Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum

Artist Judy Baca argues that muralism is a work made in relatedness: related to the people that surround it; related to the place it is in, and made in a public voice. Like Baca, artists across the Americas created murals that spoke to the period and communities for which they were designed. This symposium brings together an international group of scholars to discuss new approaches to understanding the function and meaning of both ancient and modern murals as well as their enduring legacy.

Click here for online ticketing to the symposium (https://tickets.denverartmuseum.org/selection.aspx?item=1670)

Can’t attend the entire slate of lectures? Click here and join us for the November 2nd evening keynote address and reception (https://tickets.denverartmuseum.org/DateSelection.aspx?item=1669)

Keynote Lecture, November 2
Judy Baca (Social and Public Art Resource Center/University of California Los Angeles)
Baca is a painter and muralist, monument builder, scholar, and founder of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC).Baca’s work is as much about the process of as is about the end result. As an artist she acknowledges and honors the fact that the land has memory that must be expressed, and she creates art that is shaped by an interactive relationship among history, people and place. Her murals mark the dignity of hidden historical precedents, restore connections and stimulate new relationships into the future.

Symposium Speakers, November 3-4
Claudia Brittenham (University of Chicago)
In the land of the Rainbow Serpent: Murals from the Chichen Itza
Severin Fowles (Barnard College)
Comanche Visual Culture and the Theater of War in 18th Century New Mexico
Kelley Hays-Gilpin (Northern Arizona University)
Murals of the American Southwest
Heather Hurst (Skidmore College)
The Oxtotitlan mural in Guerrero, Mexico
Diana Maglioni (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
An Overview of the Mural Painting Traditions in Mesoamerica Through Their Materiality
Lucha Martinez (Archaeologist and Independent Scholar, INAH/Denver)
Denver’s Chicano Murals
Ricardo Morales (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú)
Moche mural painting from Huaca de la Luna
Franco Rossi (Boston University)
Murals and the Archaeological Inquiry into Ancient Maya Education
Alexandre Tokovinine (University of Alabama)
Heavenly Bodies: The Upper World on Classic Maya Stucco Facades
Lisa Trever (University of California, Berkeley)
From Petroglyphs to Graffiti: Vision, Gesture, and Replication in Ancient Andean Murals
Teresa Uriarte (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
The Murals of Teotihuacan

Admission fee for the Murals of the Americas symposium (which includes the keynote address and reception):
$20 Students, $75 Alianza Members, $80 DAM Member, $85 Other.
Can’t attend the entire slate of lectures? Join us for the November 2nd evening keynote address and reception:
$18 DAM members, $20 non-members.
Register using the above link or look for a brochure mailing, including registration by check option, to mail late summer.

Photo:
(detail) Teotihuacan wall mural fragment. Mexico, AD 650–750. Lime plaster and polychrome paint, 29¾ x 37 in. Denver Art Museum, Department acquisition funds; 1965.202

10/28/2016

Photos from the 2016 Circulacion symposium!

10/14/2016

One week until the 16th Annual Mayer Center symposium!
Circulacion: Movement of Ideas, Art and People in Spanish America
October 21-22, 2016
Sharp Auditorium, Denver Art Museum
Register here!
https://tickets.denverartmuseum.org/DateSelection.aspx?item=1487

The movement of artwork and artists, as well as the circulation of ideas and ideologies, shaped culture in Spanish America. A group of international scholars will assemble in Denver to explore topics related to artistic exchange, ranging from local interactions to global networks, and their influenc...

07/14/2016

Just released! Papers from the 2014 Mayer Center Symposium, New England / New Spain: Portraiture in the Colonial Americas, 1492-1850. Available through the Denver Art Museum shop and University of Oklahoma press (http://www.oupress.com/).

In 2014 the Denver Art Museum held a symposium hosted by the Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art and co-organized by Donna Pierce and Emily Ballew Neff, Director of the Brooks Museum, Memphis. They assembled an international group of scholars to present recent r...

05/11/2016

Announcing the 16th Annual Mayer Center Symposium
Circulación: Movement of Ideas, Art and People in Spanish America

October 21–22, 2016
Sharp Auditorium (Hamilton Building), Denver Art Museum

Tickets now on sale! Go to...
https://tickets.denverartmuseum.org/DateSelection.aspx?item=1487

The movement of artwork and artists, as well as the circulation of ideas and ideologies, shaped culture in Spanish America. A group of international scholars will assemble in Denver to explore topics related to artistic exchange, ranging from local interactions to global networks, and their influence on the art and architecture of the region. Organized by Jorge Rivas Perez, Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum.

Symposium speakers:
Idurre Alonso (Getty Research Institute | Los Angeles, CA)
Urban Intersections in Latin America: From Paris to Samaná
Gustavo Curiel (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México | Mexico City, Mexico)
Flemish Imagery in Oaxacan Furniture: Villa Alta Cabinetmakers of the Zapotec Mountains, 17th-18th Centuries
Mónica Dominguez Torres (University of Delaware | Newark, DE)
‘Nel più ricco paese del Mondo’: Cubagua Island as the Epicenter of the Early Caribbean Trade
María J Feliciano (Independent scholar | New York, NY)
Moving beyond the Mudéjar in Viceregal Art and Architectural History
Esteban García Brosseau (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México | Mexico City, Mexico)
Jacques de Coutre and Antonio de Morga (16th-17th c.): Further Insights into Cultural and Artistic Exchange between South Asia and Spanish America
Rosario Inés Granados-Salinas (Skidmore College | Saratoga Springs, NY)
Miraculous Narratives: Time and Space Colliding in Spanish Colonial Painting
Natalia Mujluf (Museo de Arte de Lima | Lima, Peru)
The Dawn of an Era: Portraiture and Social Change in the Work of José Gil de Castro
Constanza Toquica (Museo Colonial | Bogotá, Colombia)
El Territorio Vacío, Entre el Cielo y el In****no: Reflections on Colonial Imagery
Rachael Zimmerman (University of Delaware | Newark, DE)
The Hammock as an Honorary Mode of Transportation in Colonial Brazil

Look for a brochure mailing, including registration by check option, to mail this summer. To join the Mayer Center email/mailing list please email [email protected].

(detail) Portrait of Doña María Dolores del Río y Alday. Mexico, 1780. Oil on canvas, 661Ž4 x 383Ž4 in. (168.3 x 98.4 cm). Denver Art Museum, Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2013.332.

05/05/2016

On April 14, 2016 Lucia Henderson, Mayer Fellow of pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum, gave a gallery talk and tour entitled, The Built and Unbuilt Landscapes of the Ancient Maya. She chose some key objects to interpret and share with the group.

05/05/2016

Leslie Todd (University of Florida, Gainesville) was the recipient of the 2015/2016 Alianza Mayer scholarship (http://www.alianza-dam.org/scholarships.php). Leslie spent two weeks at the Denver Art Museum in February 2016 examining sculpture from Ecuador in the collection and conducting research in the Frederick R. Mayer Library.