The Materiality of Insurgency in the Colonial Andes

Please join us this Thursday, October 29 at 5pm via Zoom for a talk by Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University), "The Materiality of Insurgency in the Colonial Andes."  This presentation explores themes of loss, erasure, and effacement of artworks in eighteenth-century Peru and Bolivia, positing the modification of material culture as a form of world-making by considering case studies from the Tupac Amaru and Katari Rebellions, which sought the overthrow of Spanish colonial rule. 

Traditional art historical studies that focus exclusively on fully intact or “museum quality” artworks distort our understanding of fraught periods of history, and particularly rebellions and uprisings, due to severe censorship campaigns in their aftermath that sought to restore colonial order through targeted iconoclasm. This presentation offers new insights for writing about art’s entanglement with political violence, underscoring the gains that can be made through interdisciplinary methodologies for recovering Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous artists and subjects that have been erased from the official archive. 

This talk is part of the year-long "Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art" lecture series organised by the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.  Dr. Cohen-Aponte's lecture is also co-sponsored by the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and is the 2020 Terry K. Simmons Lecture in Art History for this year. 

Zoom meeting info:  https://tulane.zoom.us/j/98937431062