Robert-Goldwater-Library

The Thousand Faces of Mexico

 
The crafts and textiles of indigenous Indian groups from the collection of Ruth Lechuga are on show from 29 September

via The Art Newspaper :

From What's On:
Mexican art in Finland
Posted 28 September 2006

"The Thousand Faces of Mexico" on view at the Helsinki Design Museum (until 14 January 2007) is a massive survey of Mexican art drawn from two private collections. The first group comes from the holdings of the Austrian doctor Ruth Lechuga, who fled to Mexico during World War II, where she began to collect the crafts and textiles of indigenous Indian groups. Ms Lechuga travelled the country over the next 50 years, amassing a large collection of objects, including the largest collection of Mexican ceremonial masks in the world. The Design Museum is showing 500 masks, as well as examples of hand-woven cloths, embroidered textiles, lacquerwork and ceramics, on loan outside Mexico for the first time. Also on view are photographs documenting Indian rituals, taken by Ms Lechuga during her travels. The other group is gathered from the collection of Franz Mayer, a German stockbroker who moved to Mexico in 1905, which includes art from the 16th to the 19th centuries, when Mexico was under Spanish rule. The objects on view combine rich local resources with the artistic traditions of Europe, such as coconut-shell goblets inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl.

Grisly excavations at Teotihuacán

Of passing interest ...

A continuing series of irregular blog posts highlighting articles in the popular press.

Williams, A.R.; photographs by Jesús Eduardo López Reyes. "Pyramids of Death." National Geographic, vol. 210, no. 4 (Oct. 2006), p. 144-153. col. ill.

"At the Pyramid of the Moon in central Mexico, humans and animals were buried alive. Excavations reveal the remains of sacrifices once witnessed by thousands of spectators."

• Click here for Web excerpt

Guess who's coming as dinner

Boiled bones show Aztecs butchered, ate invaders

via Reuters
Aug 23, 2006 — By Catherine Bremer

CALPULALPAN, Mexico (Reuters) - Skeletons found at an unearthed site in Mexico show Aztecs captured, ritually sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.

Skulls and bones from the Tecuaque archeological site near Mexico City show about 550 victims had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests in ritual offerings, and were dismembered or had their bones boiled or scraped clean, experts say.

The findings support accounts of Aztecs capturing and killing a caravan of Spanish conquistadors and local men, women and children traveling with them in revenge for the murder of Cacamatzin, king of the Aztec empire's No. 2 city of Texcoco.

Experts say the discovery proves some Aztecs did resist the conquistadors led by explorer Hernan Cortes, even though history books say most welcomed the white-skinned horsemen in the belief they were returning Aztec gods.

"This is the first place that has so much evidence there was resistance to the conquest," said archeologist Enrique Martinez, director of the dig at Calpulalpan in Tlaxcala state, near Texcoco.

"It shows it wasn't all submission. There was a fight."

Read full article here ... o aquí en español

 

Mapping the Worlds of 16th century Mexico

Title
Codex Reese. [left quarter]

Published/Created
n.p.
ca. 1565.

Physical Description
1 ms. map : hand col. ; 72.5 x 177.5 cm.

Call Number
WA MSS S-2533

Notes
Nahuatl map on maguey paper documenting agricultural holdings in the Valley of Mexico, probably fields of bulrush or maize under the colonial jurisdiction of Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, ca. 1565. [READ ON...]

via Diana Fane (thanks!):

Announcing:
MAPPING THE WORLDS
of sixteenth-century Mexico

A symposium at Yale University
September 15 & 16, 2006

The recent discovery of a sixteenth-century Mexican land map in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library provides the starting point for this Yale-sponsored symposium. Drawn by indigenous artists and probably commissioned by the Spanish colonial government, the map is one of the earliest depictions of New Spain. Symposium participants will cover a broad range of topics relevant to studies of the early colonial period in Central Mexico, including the changing politics of land usage, the role of women in society, and the place of religious institutions in the Nahua-Christian world. The symposium will also examine other related manuscripts from 16th-century Mexico and their social, cultural, and visual contexts.

Sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Council on latin American & Iberian Studies of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and the Department of the History of Art, Yale University.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Friday September 15
A keynote lecture by Rolena Adorno, Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish, Yale University

Reception to follow.

Saturday September 16
Speakers scheduled to appear:

Dennis Carr, Yale University; Maria Casteñeda de la Paz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Jaime Lara, Yale Divinity School; Diana Magaloni, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Mary Miller, Yale University; Barbara Mundy, Fordham University; Matthew Robb, Yale University; Gordon Whittaker, Göttingen University.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Women in Ancient Mexico and Peru

Divine and Human:
Women in Ancient
Mexico and Peru
March 3, 2006 - May 28, 2006

via the National Museum of Women in the Arts website:

Divine and Human: Women in Ancient Mexico and Peru examines the important and varied roles played by women in a “Who’s Who” of the major civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica and in the Andean region, including the Aztec, Mayan, Zapotec, Moche, Mixtec, and Incan cultures.

The more than 400 objects comprising this exhibition, including sculptures, textiles, pottery, jewelry, and grave goods, attest to the powerful, but often overlooked roles women played in both the daily and spiritual life of their respective societies. Women were not only daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers, but were also healers, midwives, scribes, artists, poets, priestesses, warriors, and governors; some were even considered goddesses.

NMWA is located at 1250 New York Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20005
tel: 202-783-5000, 1-800-222-7270
Monday-Saturday: 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Sunday: noon - 5:00 p.m. 

Indigenous Self-Portraiture, Chiapas

image source

via NYTimes:
Self-Portraits by Invisible People [excerpts]
By CAROL KINO
Published: October 23, 2005

SINCE the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico in 1519, the story of that country's indigenous people has largely been told by others. And, since the 19th century, much of it has been told through photography.

Not long after the invention of the daguerreotype, European and American archaeologist-adventurers were hauling their equipment across the Yucatán to photograph Maya ruins. They were soon followed by anthropologists, like the American ethnographer Frederick Starr, who focused their cameras on human beings. Then, during the Mexican Renaissance of the 1920's, art photographers like Tina Modotti and her Mexico City-born protégé, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, began to celebrate the indigenous life and culture in their work.

But in 1992 a small organization in Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state, began to correct this imbalance by providing cameras and basic photography instruction to the local Maya Indians, many of whom could be descendants of those who were depicted by outsiders in the past. To date, the organization, the Chiapas Photography Project, has worked with more than 250 Maya photographers from 10 different ethnic groups living in and around the highlands city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, a tourist magnet that is the commercial locus for Indians living throughout the state. [...]

Because many of the photographers live in the Zapatista conflict zone, one might logically expect their lenses to be trained on political subject matter. Instead, they tend to focus on the pleasures of daily life, revealing an aesthetic outlook that is more elegant and spare than historical photography might suggest. [read full article]

More about the Chiapas Photography Project:

The Indigenous Photography Archive is an artistic project by and for indigenous photographers in Chiapas. AFI has four main activities: education, collection, outreach, and research.

Education: LOK´TAMAYACH directs most of the educational activities, which begin with basic instruction about camera use and continue with a program of workshops to improve technique and develop individual projects.

Collection: The base of the collection, which is housed at AFI, is made up of the photographers’ negatives, with approximately 75,000 images, the majority of which are color, with a growing area of black and white work. The photographers are not only forming this collection for their present-day communities, but so that their descendants will have their own visual history. Among the many themes are portraits, food, and fiestas.

Outreach: Activities include exhibitions and publications as well as slide presentations and panel discussions.

Research: The indigenous photographers as well as many international, outside researchers consult AFI’s collection and frequently request permission to use images for academic ends – books, theses, articles, videos, etc.