In the Bartels Gallery, Floor 1L
The artworks featured in this exhibition span more than three hundred years of history, five thousand miles of territory, and two oceans, introducing the rich artistic traditions of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the period of Spanish colonial rule (approximately 1492–1830).
This first exhibition of colonial Latin American art at Cornell considers the profound impact of colonization, evangelization, and the transatlantic slave trade in the visual culture of the Spanish empire, while also manifesting the creative agency and resilience of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race artists during a tumultuous historical period bookended by conquest and revolution.
At first glance, these religious images, portraits, and luxury goods might seem to uphold colonial structures that suggest a one-way flow of power from Europe to the Americas. Yet closer consideration of these artists’ identities, materials, techniques, and subjects reveals compelling stories about the global crossings of people, commodities, and ideas in the creation of new visual languages in the Spanish Americas. These artworks testify to entangled cultural landscapes—from paintings of the Virgin Mary with ties to sacred sites of her apparition, to lacquer furniture bearing the visual stamp of trade with East Asia, they embody a plurality of cultural, material, and religious meanings.
Colonial Crossings was cocurated by Dr. Andrew C. Weislogel, Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Museum, and Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Associate Professor of the History of Art & Visual Studies, and the students in Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas (ARTH 4166/6166):
Osiel Aldaba ’26
Miguel Barrera ’24
Daniel Dixon ’24
Juliana Fagua Arias, PhD student
Miche Flores, PhD student
Isa Goico ’24
Sara Handerhan ’24
Emily Hernandez ’25
Ashley Koca ’25
Maximilian Leston ’26
Maria Mendoza Blanco ’26
Lena Sow, PhD student
Nicholas Vega ’26
We are grateful to lenders Carl and Marilynn Thoma, the Denver Museum of Art, the Hispanic Society of America, and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; and to David Ni ’24, the 2023 Nancy Horton Bartels ’48 Scholar for Collections, for organizational support.
The exhibition has been made possible in part through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.
Additional support was provided by an endowment in memory of Elizabeth Miller Francis ’47, the Donald and Maria Cox Exhibition Endowment, the Alan and Betsey Harris Exhibition Endowment, and a gift from Younghee Kim-Wait. Support has also been made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Selected Artworks
View of Roseau Valley, Island of Dominica, showing Africans, Carib Indians, and Creole Planters
Agostino Brunias
La Maternidad
Wifredo Lam
Vessel with red-checkered pattern
Peru, Chancay
Conical paccha with three figures
Cara/Panzaleo (Ecuador)
Angel indescreto
Mariana Yampolsky