Nature and Spirit: Ancient Costa Rican Treasures in the Mayer Collection at the Denver Art Museum

Assembled almost entirely by Frederick and Jan Mayer, The Denver Art Museum's collection of ancient Costa Rican art is one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, and it is a major component of the museum's acclaimed holdings in New World art. Nature and Spirit reveals to the modern world the richness and sophistication of indigenous thought and the incredible beauty of native art in the Americas.

Costa Rica boasts an astounding variety of wildlife. So it is not surprising that animals and supernatural human-animal hybrids are often depicted in the ornate gold, jade, stone, and ceramic objects fashioned by the region's ancient peoples. These treasures offer insights into the nature and spirit of their makers.

Generously illustrated and engagingly organized, Nature and Spirit is both an excellent introduction to Costa Rican art and an essential addition to any collection on native peoples of the Americas. Essays by art historians Margaret Young-Sánchez (Denver Art Museum) and Heather Orr (Western State College, Colorado), archaeologists Michael Snarskis (Costa Rica) and John Hoopes (University of Kansas), and anthropologist and linguist David Mora Marín (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) illuminate ancient Costa Rican artistic styles, as well as cultural and religious beliefs, and place the works in archaeological context.

Margaret Young-Sánchez is Chief Curator and Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum. She curated the collections of pre-Columbian, African, Oceanic, and American Indian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art for ten years, before moving to Denver in 1999. Dr. Young-S nchez earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in anthropology at Yale University and a doctorate in art history at Columbia University. Her exhibition Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca opened in Denver in 2004.