Visual Culture in Spain and Mexico

Visual Culture in Spain and Mexico PDF Author: Anny Brooksbank Jones
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Visual Culture in Spain and Mexico analyzes films, paintings and museum exhibitions to show how aspects of hispanic visual culture 'manage' or 'mediate' risk, as articulated stylistically and ideologically in the visual artefact. The book is divided into six chapters plus an Introduction. The first three chapters deal with Mexico or more accurately aspects of life in Mexico City; the other three with Spain or more precisely with the Basque Country and aspects of cultural appropriation which include but also exceed Basque cultural politics.

Traveling from New Spain to Mexico

Traveling from New Spain to Mexico PDF Author: Magali M. Carrera
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822349914
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
How colonial mapping traditions were combined with practices of nineteenth-century visual culture in the first maps of independent Mexico, particularly in those created by the respected cartographer Antonio Garc&ía Cubas.

Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture PDF Author: María Fernández
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292745354
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects. Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world—in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.

Imagining Identity in New Spain

Imagining Identity in New Spain PDF Author: Magali M. Carrera
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292712454
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad(status) and raza(lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of castapaintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians. Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and castapaintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies--elite and non-elite--as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

Looking for Mexico

Looking for Mexico PDF Author: John Mraz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
In Looking for Mexico, a leading historian of visual culture, John Mraz, provides a panoramic view of Mexico’s modern visual culture from the U.S. invasion of 1847 to the present. Along the way, he illuminates the powerful role of photographs, films, illustrated magazines, and image-filled history books in the construction of national identity, showing how Mexicans have both made themselves and been made with the webs of significance spun by modern media. Central to Mraz’s book is photography, which was distributed widely throughout Mexico in the form of cartes-de-visite, postcards, and illustrated magazines. Mraz analyzes the work of a broad range of photographers, including Guillermo Kahlo, Winfield Scott, Hugo Brehme, Agustín Víctor Casasola, Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, Pedro Meyer, and the New Photojournalists. He also examines representations of Mexico’s past in the country’s influential picture histories: popular, large-format, multivolume series replete with thousands of photographs and an assortment of texts. Turning to film, Mraz compares portrayals of the Mexican Revolution by Fernando de Fuentes to the later movies of Emilio Fernández and Gabriel Figueroa. He considers major stars of Golden Age cinema as gender archetypes for mexicanidad, juxtaposing the charros (hacienda cowboys) embodied by Pedro Infante, Pedro Armendáriz, and Jorge Negrete with the effacing women: the mother, Indian, and shrew as played by Sara García, Dolores del Río, and María Félix. Mraz also analyzes the leading comedians of the Mexican screen, representations of the 1968 student revolt, and depictions of Frida Kahlo in films made by Paul Leduc and Julie Taymor. Filled with more than fifty illustrations, Looking for Mexico is an exuberant plunge into Mexico’s national identity, its visual culture, and the connections between the two.

Casta Painting

Casta Painting PDF Author: Ilona Katzew
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300109719
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Casta painting is a distinctive Mexican genre that portrays racial mixing among the Indians, Spaniards & Africans who inhabited the colony, depicted in sets of consecutive images. Ilona Katzew places this art form in its social & historical context.

Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture

Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture PDF Author: Lauren Beck
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604978544
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
*Includes rare color images. This book demonstrates the evolution of Spain's conceptualisation of its enemies, from biblical and Roman times to the early modern period, and it also illustrates how this transformative discourse became exercised upon Spain by its own enemies in Europe. Each chapter contributes to the study of multiplicity as both a problem to be studied as well as a scholarly methodology that anticipates the structure of the problem. This book is divided into three thematic sections, the first of which establishes the medieval roots for representing Spain's early modern enemies. The two chapters that compose this section respectively explore the naming and visualization of an enemy that was almost entirely Muslim. The second section of this book contains two chapters that explore the textual and visual references to Islam in the Americas during the conquest and early in the period of colonization. The last section of this book contrasts the quality of information conveyed by archival and mass-produced texts. The first of two chapters notes that Muslims indeed did come to the Spanish Americas in the early modern period. The archival research prepared for this chapter contrasts with the mass-produced images and texts in the last chapter, and it is argued that different qualities of information are communicated by mass-produced, and therefore shaped, discourse, rather than by uncirculated, unarticulated texts. That is, out of the archives, a different picture of Islam in the Americas emerges. The final chapter examines how Spanish-authored chronicles became transformed through translation, and with the attachment of new illustrations, into propagandistic tools designed to undermine Spanish conquest and claims on land. This book identifies and illustrates the discourse imposed upon Spain's enemies, and demonstrates how other Europeans used that same discourse to de-Occidentalize, disparage and criticize Spanish activities in the early modern period. Each chapter explores the implications of textual and visual multiplicity while questioning the impact multiplicity has had on the conceptualization of the conquest in more modern times. Scholars of history and literature will appreciate different aspects of this book's arguments. The former will encounter in-depth and copious archival sources about the conquest and its related themes, whereas the latter will enjoy the text-image and literary analysis of those aforementioned sources.

Visible Empire

Visible Empire PDF Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226058530
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.

Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America

Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004302158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
Envisioning Others offers a multidisciplinary view of the relationship between race and visual culture in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, from the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal to colonial Peru and Colombia, post-Independence Mexico, and the pre-Emancipation United States. Contributed by specialists in Latin American and Iberian art history, literature, history, and cultural studies, its ten chapters take a transnational view of what ‘race’ meant, and how visual culture supported and shaped this meaning, within the Ibero-American sphere from the late Middle Ages to the modern era. Case studies and regionally-focused essays are balanced by historiographical and theoretical offerings for a fresh perspective that challenges the reader to discern broad intersections of race, color, and the visual throughout the Iberian world. Contributors are Beatriz Balanta, Charlene Villaseñor Black, Larissa Brewer-García, Ananda Cohen Suarez, Elisa Foster, Grace Harpster, Ilona Katzew, Matilde Mateo, Mey-Yen Moriuchi, and Erin Kathleen Rowe.

The Art of Allegiance

The Art of Allegiance PDF Author: Michael J. Schreffler
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
The Art of Allegiance explores the ways in which Spanish imperial authority was manifested in a compelling system of representation for the subjects of New Spain during the seventeenth century. Michael Schreffler identifies and analyzes a corpus of "source" material--paintings, maps, buildings, and texts--produced in and around Mexico City that addresses themes of kingly presence and authority as well as obedience, loyalty, and allegiance to the crown. The Art of Allegiance opens with a discussion of the royal palace in Mexico City, now destroyed but known through a number of images, and then moves on to consider its interior decoration, particularly the Hall of Royal Accord and the numerous portraits of royalty and government officials displayed in the palace. Subsequent chapters examine images in which the conquest of Mexico is depicted, maps showing New Spain's relationship to Spain and the larger world, and the restructuring of space in and through imperial rule. Although the book focuses on material from the reign of Charles II (1665-1700), it sheds light on the wider development of cultural politics in the Spanish colonial world.