By Tim Gihring //
In 1854, the word “Pre-Columbian” first came into use, according to Merriam-Webster, bifurcating the history of the Americas into a time before Columbus arrived and a time after. As the 19th century proceeded, the term would be deployed more and more frequently, as if to entrench the idea—ennobled by Manifest Destiny—that life as it was known here before 1492 had come to an end. The past was prelude, a slate wiped clean. It was, quite literally, history.
Among the contemporary artworks in “ReVisión” is this 2009 installation, Afro: Charlie, by Jorge Pineda.
This understanding of the Americas, we now know, is as untrue as it is ubiquitous. The landscapes and cultures that were here when Columbus arrived, along with the forces that shaped them, are still with us in one form or another. There is no clear break, in 1492 or any other date. The history of the Americas, like all history, is one long drama, still playing out. And yet the bifurcation remains ingrained in American culture, including museums, where Pre-Columbian and contemporary art have rarely crossed paths. Indeed, they’re often in separate institutions.
“ReVisión: Art in the Americas,” now on view at Mia, bridges the divide with a simple but liberating concept: no boundaries. Art made 500 years ago mixes with art made in the last five; art from the Andes mixes with art from Cuba. The show is organized not by time or place but things—land, water, resources, beliefs. “It’s a way of linking the past and present and the things that have impacted the region throughout time,” says Valéria Piccoli, Mia’s curator of Latin American art and the Ken and Linda Cutler Chair of the Arts of the Americas. “We are always going back to the past to make our present.”
The exhibition was organized by the Denver Museum of Art, and is largely drawn from its rich collection of Latin American art. But Piccoli has supplemented the show with 37 pieces from Mia’s own collections. Some are rarely seen works from the collection she inherited, in late 2022, as the museum’s first curator of Latin American art. Others were pulled from different departments, like Sebastian Selgado’s 1980s photographs of the infamous Serra Pelada gold mines in Brazil—otherworldly scenes of men scaling vast pits on rickety ladders, evoking the theme of exploitation. “They’re so dramatic, so cinematic,” she says of the images, “like you’re looking at the set of an epic movie.”
Many of the artworks demonstrate how culture crosses boundaries, sometimes in unexpected ways. A crucifix formed with corn paste intermingles the spirituality of Spanish Christians and the Maya, for whom corn is sacred. Icons of Catholic saints incorporate shells and feathers, long treasured in the Americas. A painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary as she reportedly appeared to an indigenous Mexican man in the early 1500s, offers a well-known example of “the transfer of symbolism from one culture to another,” as Piccoli puts it. When the story spread, including the persuasive detail that Mary’s image had been miraculously emblazoned on the man’s tilma, a regional kind of cloak, conversions followed.
Four of sixteen portraits in a series made in Peru in the 1800s showing Inca rulers—and Francisco Pizarro.
The art that best embodies the show’s argument, however, is perhaps its most nakedly colonialist. A series of portraits, painted in the early 1800s, shows a long succession of Inca rulers, adorned with nearly identical feather headdresses and ceremonial weapons. And then, at the end of the line as it were, there’s Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, similarly attired with his sword and plumed helmet. The idea, of course, was to demonstrate the legitimacy of Spanish rule, as simply the latest (if last) transfer of power in the region—of a piece with the past.
When the series was created, in Peru, sometime between 1830 and 1850, the country had in fact just won its independence from Spain. But conservative landowners—largely Spanish loyalists—were seething, trying to destabilize indigenous interests, and Spain would eventually send its navy in a bid to regain control. The portrait series, arguing that the aristocratic class of Spanish descendants were the rightful heirs of this place, might have been powerful propaganda. Now, however, it suggests that even 200 years ago, among colonial interests, history was understood to be seamless. Powers come and go. Borders shift. Everything changes and nothing changes.