Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0878468129 ISBN 13: 9780878468126

Publisher: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015

Synopsis

Made in the Americas reveals the overlooked history of Asia's profound influence on the arts of the colonial Americas. Beginning in the 16th century, European outposts in the New World, especially those in New Spain, became a major nexus of the Asian export trade. Craftsmen from Canada to Peru, inspired by the sophisticated designs and advanced techniques of these imported goods, combined Asian styles with local traditions to produce unparalleled furniture, silverwork, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, painting and architectural ornaments.
Among the exquisite objects featured in this book, from across the hemisphere and spanning the 17th to the early 19th centuries, are folding screens made in Mexico in imitation of imported Japanese and Chinese screens; blue-and-white talavera ceramics copied from Chinese porcelains; luxuriously woven textiles, made to replicate fine silks and cottons from China and India; devotional statues that adapt Buddhist gods into Christian saints; and "japanned" furniture produced in Boston that simulates Asian lacquer finishes. The stories told by the objects gathered in Made in the Americas bring to life the rich cultural interchange and the spectacular arts of the first global age.

About this title

About the Author

Dennis Carr earned his Master's degree in Higher Education Administration from Boston College with a concentration in Catholic University Leadership.

Dennis Carr is Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Dennis is a contributing author to Common Wealth, as well as being the author of Made in the Americas.

Timothy Brook is a historian of China since the fourteenth century. He is currently Professor of Chinese History in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where he holds the Republic of China Chair at the Institute for Asian Research. Previous appointments include Mactaggart Fellow at the University of Alberta, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Stanford University, and Shaw Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, from 2007 to 2009. He has published five books on the Ming dynasty, three on China in the twentieth century, and one on global history. He was also the General Editor of the six-volume History of Imperial China. His most widely read and translated book is Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global Age, awarded the Mark Lynton Prize from the Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, and the Prix Auguste Pavie from the Academie des Sciences d'Outre-mer.

Review

Made in the Americas tells the story of centuries of cross-fertilization that followed the opening of trade between Europe and Asia; the Americas, in the middle of many oceanic routes, was the place where traditions melded in the most imaginative ways. (The Economist)

A must-read catalog (Lee Lawrence Wall Street Journal)

Edition details

• Publisher: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0878468129
• ISBN 13: 9780878468126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160