Transforming Images
New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds
376 pages | 91 color/114 b&w illustrations/3 maps | 9 x 10 | 2006
ISBN 978-0-271-02690-9 | cloth: $83.00 sh
Paperback edition is not available
"This manuscript is quite unlike anything yet published on New Mexican colonial-period material. Long overdue, it not only brings together a wealth of new material, but it also addresses the region with an academic sophistication and respect that has been lacking, problematizing religious artworks with a strong theoretical underpinning and an interdisciplinary approach. Overall, the anthology chides and corrects conventional Eurocentric scholarship that devotes most attention to categorizing and identifying iconographic and stylistic patterns and continues to be inattentive to the reception, function, and bicultural production of artifacts. Particularly noteworthy is the effort to underscore the strong indigenous influence in colonial arts through both authorship and artistic/cultural influences during the campaign to evangelize and hispanize the Amerindian population. By and large, the artworks are situated in a well researched social, political, historical context with the primary focus on how santos are made, or seen, to operate." —Jeanette Favrot Peterson, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Style” has been one of the cornerstones not only ofthe modern discipline of art history but also of social and culturalhistory. In this volume, the writers consider the inadequacy ofthe concept of style as essential to a person, people, place, orperiod. While the subject matter of this book is specific to religiouspractices and artifacts from New Mexico between the eighteenth andtwentieth centuries, the implications of these investigations arefar reaching historically, methodologically, and theoretically.
The essays collected here explore the Catholic instruments of religiousdevotion produced in New Mexico from around 1760 until the radicaltransformation of the tradition in the twentieth century. The writersin this volume make three key arguments. First, they make a casefor bringing new theoretical perspectives and research strategiesto bear on the New Mexican materials and other colonial contexts.Second, they demonstrate that the New Mexican materials providean excellent case study for rethinking many of the most fundamentalquestions in art-historical and anthropological study. Third, theauthors collectively argue that the New Mexican images had, andstill have, importance to diverse audiences and makers.
The distinctiveness of New Mexican santos consists not only in theirsubjects (which conformed to Catholic Reformation tastes) but alsoin elements that may appear to have been “merely decorative”:graphically striking and frequently elaborate abstract design motifsand landscape references. Despite their anonymity, the images are,as a group, readily distinguished from local products anywhere elsein the Spanish colonial world. This distinctiveness suggests thatwe should inquire not so much about the individual identities oftheir makers as about the collective identity of the society and place that produced and used them.
Claire Farago is Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Paragone”: A Critical Interpretationwith a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas (1992).
Contents
,br />Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
Problems for Interpretation
Mediating Ethnicity and Culture
The Semiotics of Images
Reception of Sources in New Mexico
Interleaf A: Political Allusions
Reconstructing Ethnicity
Formative Era, 1693–1700
Dynamic Ethnicity in Eighteenth Century
Interleaf B: Research and Human Genome
Hybrid Households
Christian Icons, Theory and History
The Early Santeros
Interleaf C: The Life of an Artist
Hide Painting: Archival Evidence
Hide Paintings, Sources
Transforming Images
Interleaf D: Sound, Image, Identity
Inventing Modern Identities
Competing Religious Discourses
Tradition Reconfigured
Problems of Attribution
Santos in Contemporary Life
Interleaf E: Catholicism and Pueblos
Epilogue
Re(f)using Art
Notes
Consolidated Bibliography
Contributors
Photo Credits
Index