The Los Angeles County Museum of Art Explores the "Spanish Colonial World"

Written by Emile Antonowsky Wednesday, 02 November 2011 22:57

Los Angeles, California.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), in partnership with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), Mexico, is proud to present "Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World", the first exhibition in the United States to examine the significance of indigenous peoples and cultures within the complex social and artistic landscape of colonial Latin America. On view from November 6th through January 29th 2012, the exhibition offers a comparative view of Mexico and Peru, the two principal viceroyalties of Spanish America, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and includes a selection of approximately 200 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, codices, manuscripts, queros (ceremonial drinking vessels), featherworks, and other extraordinary objects.

“This exhibition, which brings together a remarkable group of artworks from Mexico and Peru (two areas which were much larger than the countries known by those names today), provides a unique opportunity to examine the connection between ancient and colonial artistic traditions,” said Ilona Katzew, exhibition curator and department head of Latin American art. “By taking into consideration the pre-Columbian (Inca and Aztec) origins of these two regions and their continuities and ruptures over time, Contested Visions greatly enriches our understanding of how art and power intersected in the Spanish colonial world.” Following his conquest of the Mexica (commonly known as the Aztecs) in 1521, Hernán Cortés took possession of the heart of what would become the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the name of the Spanish king. Spain soon established a network of civil and religious authority that would effectively govern the immense territory, which encompassed present-day Mexico plus much of Central America and the Spanish borderlands that are now part of the United States.

The viceroyalty’s capital, Mexico City, was built atop the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. The Viceroyalty of Peru was established in 1548 after Francisco Pizarro and his cohort, Diego de Almagro, invaded the Inca Empire in 1532 and violently defeated its last Inca ruler, Atahualpa. Unlike New Spain, where the capital was established atop the ruins of the Aztec Empire, the new capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru was built in Lima instead of Cuzco, the center of Inca authority, and the viceroyalty encompassed present-day Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection extending from ancient times to the present. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract nearly a million visitors annually. Among the museum’s special strengths are its holdings of Asian art, housed in part in the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art; Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemente Orozco; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world. LACMA has its roots in the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, established in 1910 in Exposition Park. In 1961, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a separate, art-focused institution. In 1965, the fledgling institution opened to the public in its new Wilshire Boulevard location, with the permanent collection in the Ahmanson Building, special exhibitions in the Hammer Building, and the 600-seat Bing Theater for public programs. Over several decades, the campus and the collection have grown considerably. The Anderson Building (renamed the Art of the Americas building in 2007) opened in 1986 to house modern and contemporary art. In 1988, Bruce Goff's innovative Pavilion for Japanese Art opened at the east end of campus. In 1994, the museum acquired the May Company department store building at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, now known as LACMA West. Most recently, the Transformation project revitalized the western half of the campus with a collection of buildings designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. These include the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a three-story 60,000 square foot space for the exhibition of postwar art that opened in 2008. In fall of 2010, the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion opened to the public, providing the largest purpose-built, naturally lit, open-plan museum space in the world, with a rotating selection of major exhibitions. Ray's restaurant and Stark Bar opened in 2011, invigorating the central BP Pavilion near Chris Burden's iconic Urban Light. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.lacma.org

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