Local and Global

Between the Local and the Global: Art of the Americas

This session considers the material opportunities and local pressures caused by the circulation of raw materials and foreign objects, but it also ponders the status and shifting value of “the local,” material and otherwise, when met with diverse audiences or viewed through a historicized lens. What was considered local in the Americas, and how does this sense of the local change across geographies and throughout time? We consider not only how the “local” was crafted, collected, and invented, but how it was theorized during different periods (including our own). The session welcomes papers especially focused on Spanish America and Latin America that might address these questions from multiple perspectives, including the digital humanities.

Cristina Cruz González, PhD

Associate Professor, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma

cristina.gonzalez@okstate.edu

Session Chair

Delia Cosentino, PhD

Associate Professor, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

DCOSENT1@depaul.edu

Title: “Mapping Balbuena’s Grandeza Mexicana and Seeing the World”

Bernardo de Balbuena designed his 1604 panegyric ‘Grandeur of Mexico’ to bewitch the reader with poetic descriptions of a place that drips with architectural and material splendor. With his description of this ‘center of perfection, hinge of the world,’ the poet may well convince his reader that there is no need to look further than Mexico City to find anything any person could possibly want. But, of course, Balbuena’s civic pride is dependent on the status of New Spain as a hub of international commerce, with Asian goods playing a particularly significant role in this paean to mercantile capitalism and in the real spaces of the capital city. Balbuena paints a powerful portrait of Mexico’s glory in textual terms; this paper proposes that we look at it in spatial terms to ask new questions about how global exchange intersected with the construction of local realities. How does the map document change from the past and perhaps hopes for the future? What are the global pressure-points most affecting the Spanish American Empire? The paper is founded in an undergraduate class project which mapped the sources of materials and objects mentioned in Grandeza Mexicana.

Ray Hernández-Durán, PhD

Professor, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

rhernand@UNM.EDU

Title: “At the Interstices of History, Theory, and Practice: The Transatlantic Conceptual Foundations of José Bernardo Couto’s Diálogo sobre la historia de la pintura en México (1872)”

In 1855, José Bernardo Couto, president of the Academy of San Carlos, responded to a request by then president, Antonio López de Santa Anna for the creation of a national gallery that featured works by Mexican masters. Following the gallery’s positive reception, the collection was expanded and the galleries remodeled. During that period, ca. 1860–61, Couto began writing Diálogo sobre la historia de la pintura en México, which was completed in 1862 but published posthumously in 1872. The text is regarded as the first publication on the history of colonial Mexican painting; however, it has been observed that embedded in the dialogue’s language and interpretive approach are references to ideas promoted by such thinkers and writers, as Kant, Winckelmann, and Mengs. Continuing with this line of thought I propose that Couto’s diálogo, although aimed at defining a distinct Mexican School of Painting, can also be understood as founded on theoretical foundations that link Mexico’s artistic tradition with the ideas and principles of European fine art, confirming its status not just as one of Mexico’s earliest art historical publications but an early attempt at applying theoretical principles in the formation and study of a national Mexican art.

Patrick Hajovsky, PhD

Associate Professor, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas

hajovskp@southwestern.edu

Title: “Inertia, Transience, and the Cyclical: Indigenous Ontologies Across the Hemispheres and Among Scholars”

Art historians who focus on Amerindian cultures often find it useful (if not necessary) to insert indigenous terms and phrases into their analyses, in order to highlight concepts that are incommensurate across languages. Such methods of insertion, of foreign concepts into the landscape of Western scholarship, require lengthy explanations that yield overlapping or intersecting concepts. With regards to the Aztec and Inca—the two imperial cultures whom the Spanish colonized in the sixteenth century—a new critical turn in the field has emerged: a realization that the project of bringing such concepts into Western frameworks will always be a project of coloniality. The hybridity of these texts, through their selective citation, bears the danger of abrading the vital dimensions of indigenous aesthetics. For instance, the Aztec teotl and Inka camay almost look the same, though these cultures bore no relation to one another. A critical historiography of such parallel concepts may show another way of seeing and relating to sacred objects, especially in light of indigenous scholars who practice a kind of reverse ontology: a practice of envisioning oneself as the object looking, then envisioning oneself within it, and finally emerging out of it, transformed.

David C. Hart, PhD

Associate Professor, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

dhart@cia.edu

Title: “Defying Categories and Crossing Borders in the Art and Career of Francisco Toledo”

Since the 1980s art historians have focused critically on how museums, galleries, and collectors have shaped art historical narratives of twentieth-century art movements and examined how artists were included and excluded from these histories. Scholarship by Ann Gibson, Bridget Cooks, and Mari Carmen Ramirez is foundational to such a project, and these authors inform my current scholarship on Mexican Zapotec artist Francisco Toledo (1940-2019). This paper examines how this complex intersection of politics, identity, and culture involved not only the traditional role of the mid twentieth century gallerist as tastemaker but a newer one responding to international politics and social activism. Toledo’s art in turn resisted categorization and challenged received notions in the US about Mexican art and international modernism.