Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America

2023 Honorable Mention, Jonathan Brown Award, Society for Iberian Global Art (SIGA)

Painted Cloth explores the production, meaning, and representation of garments used in civil and religious settings across Latin America during the 1700s. Both the exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art and this accompanying catalogue, reflect on the ways in which clothing played an essential role in articulating socioeconomic, gender, and racial identity among various Indigenous groups, African slaves, Spanish colonizers, and their mixed-raced descendants. The project spotlights aesthetic components of the artistic production of the Spanish Americas while also encouraging wider conversations about the impact of the colonial period in shaping the social fabric of the region.

In addition to a foreword by Blanton director Simone Wicha, and an introduction and essay by Rosario I. Granados, Painted Cloth features essays by Julia McHugh, Trent A. Carmichael Curator of Academic Initiatives at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Ana Paulina Gámez, independent scholar and curator in Mexico City; Ricardo Kusonoki, Curator of Colonial and Republican Art, Museo de Arte de Lima; Patricia Diìaz Cayeros, fulltime researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteìticas, Universidad Nacional Autoìnoma de Meìxico; and Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, associate professor of art history, University of Florida Gainesville.

Founded in 1963, the Blanton Museum of Art of the University of Texas at Austin holds the largest public art collection in Central Texas and is the first museum in the United States to have a department and a curatorial position dedicated to the collection, research, and display of Latin American art.

Rosario Inés Granados is the Marilynn Thoma Associate Curator, Art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum of Art. She organized the exhibition Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-century Mexico and was co-editor of the Colonial Latin American Review special issue Hyperdulia Americana. Marian Chronicles in the New World.