Wednesday, November 6, 2024
12:00-1:30 p.m.
This event has been postponed. New date and time are to be determined.
Please register in advance on the Events@Brown event listing.
Lunch will be provided for registered attendees.
About the Event
This talk considers Lima’s Virgin of Copacabana (1588) through the lens of the Andean concept of camay to theorize acts of Indigenous artistic creation in the colonial world. While the statue was made by Spanish artists, placing it in visual dialog with the art, architecture, and cultural histories of its Ychsma and Chachapoya devotees reveals that even when interacting with a “European-looking” object, through Catholic ritual, and under colonial rule, Indigenous histories and beliefs had space to flourish. Far more than just a colonial sculpture, the Virgin of Copacabana is better understood as a camasqa, continuously created as it was maneuvered by its Indigenous community to operate within the fluid religious and social contexts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima.
About the Speaker
Ximena A. Gómez is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses Indigenous and Black visual culture in colonial Lima, Peru. Her work counteracts the erasure of subalterns in art historical narratives by activating the generative possibilities of archival and material erasure, and considering the visual culture of the Andes and West Africa in analyses of imported European artworks. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled, In the Hands of Devotees: Indigenous and Black Confraternities and The Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima, is scheduled to be published by the University of Texas Press in 2025. Her research has been supported by a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Fulbright-Hays commission, and a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship for advanced Quechua.
About the Series
Graduate students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies are invited to present their work at this roundtable luncheon series. Faculty and graduate student research presentations will alternate on a biweekly basis. All are welcome.