"Culture Crossings"

Panorama, 2019

Oxford Handbook of the History of Archaeology, 2024

In the course of the nineteenth century, pre-Hispanic artifacts became an archaeological category—both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and robust enough to become recognizable and valuable aesthetically, epistemologically, and commercially. Starting from the premise that antiquities do not have intrinsic meanings, but acquire them as they move geographically and conceptually, this chapter draws on an ecological approach to study the connections and follow the trajectories of three collections of a specific case study—Mexican antiquities at the National Museum of Mexico in Mexico City, at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and at the Louvre (whose collection of Mexican antiquities was later incorporated into the Ethnographic Museum at the Trocadéro, in Paris). The chapter compares the ways in which Mexican antiquities were configured by temporally and spatially situated institutional ecologies, with their specific intellectual traditions, disciplinary practices, political agendas, aesthetic sensibilities, technologies of classification and representation, and social and material infrastructures. Ultimately, the chapter reflects on the tangled, often contingent, processes by which the past matters to the present. Keywords: Mexican antiquities, archaeological categories, boundary objects, institutional ecology, Mexico, American Philosophical Society, Musée Américain, Louvre, Trocadéro

2007

Imagine a darkened seminar room occupied by a dozen graduate students and two professors. The students come from a range of fields: art history, English, American history, and material culture studies. The professors are specialists in Spanish colonial and Anglo-American art. The room is busy with dialogue as a pair of images is projected onto the screen 2). A portrait by John Hesselius depicts young Charles Calvert, regal heir to a wealthy Maryland planter family, accompanied by an enslaved servant; a casta painting by José de Ibarra represents a mixed race family, part of a set of pictures produced in Mexico likely intended to be shipped to Spain.

Library of congress cataloging-in-publication data names: armstrong-fumero, fernando, editor. | Hoil gutierrez, Julio, editor. title: Legacies of space and intangible heritage : archaeology, ethnohistory, and the politics of cultural continuity in the americas / edited by fernando armstrong-fumero and Julio Hoil gutierrez. description: boulder : University press of colorado, [2017] | includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: Lccn 2016056647| isbn 9781607325710 (cloth) | isbn 9781607326595 (pbk) | isbn 9781607325727 (ebook) subjects: LcsH: cultural landscapes-america-case studies. | cultural property-protectionamerica-case studies. | cultural property-america-Management-case studies. | Historic sites-conservation and restoration-america-case studies. | Historic sites-america-Management-case studies. classification: Lcc gf500 .L44 2017 | ddc 973-dc23 Lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056647 an electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open access isbn for the pdf version of this book is 978-1-60732-700-4; for the epUb version the open access isbn is 978-1-60732-720-2. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. front-cover photographs: taperinha plantation (top), cavern of the painted rock, Monte alegre (bottom), courtesy of anna c. roosevelt.

This article offers two readings of The Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art, a traveling exhibition of the Fomento Cultural Banamex, AC's folk art collection that coincided with Citigroup's buyout of Banamex, Mexico's second largest bank. The first, a political economic critique situates the exhibition within neoliberal economic reform of the Mexican banking system and the designs of US-based transnational banks on migrant remittances. The second, a material culture approach, focuses on the exhibitionary strategies employed to incentivize folk art consumption as a mode of cosmopolitan citizenship.

The Journal of American History, 1991

2020

The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nestor García Canclini (1995), Walter D. Mignolo (2000), and others as a liminal space, generating new kinds of hybridity in the minds and actions of so-called “border subjects.” Anzaldua identified with the spiritual, primal, indigenous roots that were hidden by years of Americanization. García Canclini offered up the notion of “hybrid cultures” in which the modern and the traditional not only coexist to create something new. Finally, Mignolo delved into the psychological mindset of the border subject, identifying a kind of “border thinking” that defines not only physical but internal borders. These theorizations were a response to the mixing of art and culture on international borders, at which a distinct society was being formed. In turn, these attempts to understand the border have influenced an artistic response that embraces the notion of site as a performative gesture. It is in this theoretical context that I will contrast two border performances, The Cloud by Alfredo Jaar (2000) and One Flew over the Void by Javier Téllez (2005).