Festivals and Daily Life in the Arts of Colonial Latin America, 1492-1850: Papers from the 2012 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum held a symposium in 2012 hosted by the Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art. The museum assembled an international group of scholars specializing in the arts and history of colonial Latin America to present recent research with topics ranging from ephemeral architecture, painting, and sculpture to engravings, decorative arts, costumes and clothing of the period. This volume presents revised and expanded versions of papers presented at the symposium. 

Barbara Mundy (Fordham University) opens this volume with a thought-provoking discussion of pre-Columbian dance festivals and their associated costumes and accoutrements, their continuation and reinterpretation in colonial Mexico, and their remaining vestiges in modern times. Gustavo Curiel (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) presents a moving discussion of the mourning activities performed in Mexico City in 1666 to commemorate the death of Philip IV; Curiel then reconstructs a vision of the ephemeral monument erected by the Inquisition by comparing documentary sources, such as the artist’s contract, with surviving engravings of a similar monument.
 
Frances Ramos (University of South Florida) brings the volume into the eighteenth century by examining celebrations and art in honor of Saint Joseph in the city of Puebla, Mexico. Beatriz Berndt (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) continues the festival theme by analyzing extant engravings, written descriptions, and political motivations in the ephemeral façade designed to celebrate the enthronement of Charles IV in Mexico City in 1789. Kelly Donahue-Wallace (University of North Texas) closes the festival section with a discussion of ephemeral structures and related public art works under the direction of the newly founded Royal Academy of Art of San Carlos in the late colonial era.
 
Jorge Rivas begins the discussion of daily life by presenting recent research on a uniquely American furniture form, the butaca (easy) chair, tracing its origins in Venezuela and its eventual spread throughout pan-Caribbean Latin America.  Susan Socolow closes the volume with an examination of women’s quotidian clothing in colonial Argentina based on documentary evidence found in travelers’ descriptions and extant estate inventories.Alexandra Troya-Kennedy (Universidad de Cuenca, Ecuador) closes the volume by tracing Ecuadorian costumbrista images of daily life from their origin in colonial-era Enlightenment discourse to their production for the tourist market and use by politicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Donna Pierce is the former Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum.