Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America - Hardcover

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi (editor) & Margarita Vargas-Betancourt (editor)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1683403525 ISBN 13: 9781683403524

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 2023

Synopsis

Rethinking the role of the artist and recovering the work of unacknowledged creators in colonial society

This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.

Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.

Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region,Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

About this title

About the Author

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, professor of art history at the University of Florida, is the author of Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520-1820.

Margarita Vargas-Betancourt is the Latin American and Caribbean Special Collections Librarian at the University of Florida.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1683403525
• ISBN 13: 9781683403524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260