Wide-ranging in its scholarly scope, “El Dorado: Myths of Gold” Part II was an ambitious attempt to explore this foundational legend and its profound and enduring impact on the Americas. The show was first conceptualized in 2020, when the Americas Society, Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires, and the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico, joined efforts and convened a number of online information sessions that resulted in a series of exhibitions at each institution dealing with the theme.
Featuring works by more than sixty artists, from the pre-Hispanic period to the contemporary era, the presentation here was divided into two iterations (the first took place in 2023). The tale of El Dorado, a hidden kingdom of gold, not only spurred greedy European colonialist expansion that destroyed ancestral territories, endangered Indigenous lives, and wreaked environmental havoc, but also was largely responsible for the powerfully destructive materialist ethos that to this day continues to destabilize social, economic, and political structures in Latin America.
One of the great strengths of this exhibition—curated by Tie Jojima, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, and Edward J. Sullivan—was that it brought examples of precolonial goldwork and colonial altarpieces, along with contemporary photography, sculpture, painting, video, and more, into a seamless installation that facilitated dialogues between historical time periods and locations. These uneasy proximities served to reveal and complicate the impact gold had, and still has, on particular communities, spurring a reevaluation of how the El Dorado story shaped personal and collective values. As an introductory wall panel in the exhibition stated, “El Doradois a tale of searches and quests, delirium, and violence.”
Andrés Bedoya, whose horde of silver Moscas (Flies), 2022, appeared to be crawling around the wall text in the first gallery, provided an apt introduction. Although created from a different precious metal, this horrifying plague serves as a metaphor for the effects of gold mining on Bolivia from the sixteenth century until today. Nearby, a long case held a priceless array of precolonial gold pendants and plaques that were scrupulously embellished with an assortment of frogs, eagles, crocodiles, and deities. Although gold’s incorruptible brilliance led it to be appreciated and used ritually by many Indigenous cultures, the element was not valued, as the Spanish thought, for status and currency.
One long wall of the larger central gallery, painted a celestial blue, featured a resplendent display of gold-filled colonial and colonial-inspired Catholic painting and sculpture. Made in Mexico, a large carved, gilded wooden tabernacle for private devotion from the eighteenth century had inset mirrors, presumably to reflect the shimmer of candlelight on gold, while nearby, Virgen del Cerro T’samajo/Chimayo (Virgin of Cerro T’samajo/Chimayo), 2023, a work by Vicente Telles, a contemporary santero (painter of saints) from New Mexico—depicted the mined mountains of Bolivia, reinfusing them with Indigenous notions of the feminine sacred. In a large vitrine was Mathias Goeritz’s arresting sculpture Cruz en la Caja (Cross in a Box), 1960–61. An important figure in Mexican modern art and architecture, Goeritz was inspired by the gold in religious European panel painting and its association with divinity. Although this piece can be folded into a gold cube, here it was unfurled into the titular cruciform shape, each panel outfitted with an ominously large spike. Intimating the suffering and transcendence of Christ, the object also alludes to the violent imposition of Christianity upon the Indigenous populations of the Americas.
Tiago Sant’Ana’s mesmerizing silent video Chão de estrelas (Ground of Stars), 2022, was projected on a wall in another gallery to great poetic effect. Shot in the Chapada Diamantina region in the state of Bahia—a historical site of gold and other precious-metal extraction—it refers to the subjugation of the Afro-Brazilian peoples by the European mining industry. A group of Black men, gracefully panning for gold in a beautiful river landscape, hold mirrors instead of pans, the reflective glass a lyrical allusion to how enslavement constructed their subjectivity. Their reflections in the water and in the mirrors, however, are reversals of reality—portals that offer an opportunity to reimagine the narrative as one of escape and liberation.
Each of the carefully selected works in this show had a complex and multivalent story to tell. Overall, the exhibition demanded we reconsider once again the cost of Europe’s ceaseless greed to Indigenous communities and cultures, both past and present.
