Native American, Latin America and Viceregal Art mod 9 done

Native American / First Nations

  • Traces of sophisticated cultures remain across what is today the United States and Canada.
  • Before 11,200 B.C.E. - c. 1500.

Clovis Culture

  • The first clear evidence of human activity in North America are spear heads called Clovis points.
  • These spear tips were used to hunt large game.
  • The period of the Clovis people coincides with the extinction of mammoths, giant sloth, camels, and giant bison in North America.
  • The extinction of these animals was caused by a combination of human hunting and climate change.
  • How did humans reach America?
    • North America was one of the last continents in the world to be settled by humans after about 15,000 BC.
    • During the last Ice Age, water, which previously flowed off the land into the sea, was frozen up in vast ice sheets and glaciers so sea levels dropped.
    • This exposed a land bridge that enabled humans to migrate through Siberia to Alaska.
    • These early Americans were highly adaptable, and Clovis points have been found throughout North America.
    • It is remarkable that over such a vast area, the distinctive characteristics of the points hardly vary.
  • Typical Clovis points have parallel to slightly convex edges which narrow to a point.
    • This shape is produced by chipping small, parallel flakes off both sides of a stone blade.
    • Following this, the point is thinned on both sides by the removal of flakes which leave a central groove or \"flute.\"
    • These flutes are the principal feature of Clovis or \"fluted\" points.
    • They originate from the base which then has a concave outline and end about one-third along the length.
    • The grooves produced by the removal of the flutes allow the point to be fitted to a wooden shaft of a spear.
  • The people who made Clovis points spread out across America looking for food and did not stay anywhere for long, although they did return to places where resources were plentiful.
  • Clovis points are sometimes found with the bones of mammoths, mastodons, sloth, and giant bison.
    • As the climate changed at the end of the last Ice Age, the habitats on which these animals depended started to disappear.
    • Their extinction was inevitable, but Clovis hunting on dwindling numbers probably contributed to their disappearance.
  • Although there are arguments in favor of pre-Clovis migrations to America, it is the \"Paleo-Indian\" Clovis people who can be most certainly identified as the probable ancestors of later Native North American peoples and cultures.

Geography

  • While the countries of Latin America can be categorized by language, they can also be organized by region.
  • Before 1492 C.E., the regions of Mesoamerica, the Isthmus (or Intermediate) Area, the Caribbean, and the Andes shared certain cultural traits, such as the same calendars, languages, and sports, as well as comparable artistic and architectural traditions.
  • After colonization, however, the borders shifted somewhat with the creation of the viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, New Granada, La Plata, and Brazil.
  • After independence (and still today), the countries stretching from Mexico to Honduras form part of the region of Mesoamerica (also known as Middle America since the Greek word \"meso\" means \"middle\").
  • Parts of Honduras and El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, which lie to the south of Middle America, make up Central America, while all the countries to the south of Panama form part of South America.
  • The Caribbean is sometimes considered part of Central America or at times entirely excluded.
  • The United States also factors into this discussion of Latin American art-through the work of Latino, Chicano, and Nuyorican artists.
  • Lastly, it is important to note that when discussing specific Latin American countries, the geographical scope in question will correspond to the current, rather than former borders.
  • While these linguistic and geographical parameters lend clarity to the study of Latin American art, they often obscure cultural differences that are not border specific.
  • The coastal cultures of Colombia and Venezuela for instance, are closer to those of the Caribbean than to their mainland counterparts.
    • This is reflected not only in the similar climate, diet, and customs of these particular areas, but also in their artistic production.
  • The islands of the Caribbean, however, are also a geographical region (delineated by the Caribbean Sea), thus the distinction between regions depends on how and where you draw the borders-reminding us of the flexibility and variety of labels that can be employed to describe the same region.
  • A similar distinction occurs in South America, where cultures vary greatly not necessarily across countries, but rather according to geographical landmarks, the two most prominent of which are the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Rainforest.
  • Stretching from Chile to Venezuela, the Andes traverse the western portion of South America.
    • At impressive heights and in snow-covered peaks, the Andean cultures of South America share irrigation techniques, textile traditions, and native languages, such as Quechua, the former language of the Incas that is today spoken by millions, that continue to this day.
  • The Amazon, the world's largest tropical rainforest, is contained mostly in Brazil, although it stretches into the bordering countries of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.
  • Just these two landmarks, without mentioning the Pacific and Atlantic coastal cultures of South America, reveal the geographical, and thus cultural diversity of the area.
  • Latin America is a useful, but by no means perfect term to describe a vast expanse of land that is historically, culturally, and geographically diverse.

Why is it important to study Latin American art today?

  • The study of Latin America and Latin American art is more relevant today than ever.
  • In the United States, the burgeoning population of Latinos-people of Latin American descent and consequently the rise of Spanish (and Spanglish) speakers, Latino musical genres, literature, and visual arts, require that we better understand the cultural origins of these diverse communities.
  • Even beyond our borders, Latin American countries continue to exert influence over political and economic policies, while their artistic traditions are everyday made more and more accessible at cultural institutions like art museums, which regularly exhibit the work of Latin American artists.
  • In many ways, Latin American and Latino culture is an inescapable reality, thus it is up to us, for the benefits of appreciation and integration, to tackle the difficult question of what it means to be from Latin America.
  • For many of us Latin America is not an entirely foreign concept, in fact our knowledge of it is most likely defined by a particular country, food, music, or artist, and sadly, it is also sometimes clouded by cultural stereotypes.
  • What many of us often overlook, is the diversity of what it means to be Latin American and Latino.
  • Interestingly, Latin America is not as different from the United States as we tend to think, since we both share in the history of conquest and imperialism, albeit from different perspectives.
  • Thus the study of Latin American art should not necessarily be thought of as a narrative that is entirely separate from that of the United States, but rather as one that is shared.

What do we mean by Latin America?

  • Latin America broadly refers to the countries in the Americas (including the Caribbean) whose national language is derived from Latin.
    • These include countries where the languages of Spanish, Portuguese, and French are spoken.
  • Latin America is therefore a historical term rooted in the colonial era, when these languages were introduced to the area by their respective European colonizers.
  • The term itself, however, was not coined until the nineteenth century, when Argentinean jurist Carlos Calvo and French engineer Michel Chevalier, in reference to the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico in 1862, used the term \"Latin\" to denote difference from the \"Anglo-Saxon\" people of North America.
  • It gained currency during the twentieth century when Mesoamerican, Central American, Caribbean, and South American countries sought to culturally distance themselves from North America, and more specifically from the United States.

Talking about Viceregal Art

  • How do we talk about viceregal art more specifically? What terms do we use to describe this complex time period and geographic region? Scholars have used a variety of labels to describe the art and architecture of the Spanish viceroyalties, some of which are problematic because they position European art as being superior or better and viceregal art as derivative and inferior.
  • Some common terms that you might see are \"colonial,\" \"viceregal,\" \"hybrid,\" or \"tequitqui.\"
    • \"Colonial\" refers to the Spanish colonies, and is often used interchangeably with viceregal.
    • However, some scholars prefer the term \"colonial\" because it highlights the process of colonization and occupation of the parts of the Americas by a foreign power.
    • \"Hybrid\" and \"tequitqui\" are two of many terms that are used to describe artworks that display the mixing or juxtaposition of Indigenous and European styles, subjects, or motifs.
    • Yet these terms are also inadequate to a degree because they assume that hybridity is always visible and that European and Indigenous styles are always \"pure.\"
  • Applying terms used to characterize early modern European art (Renaissance, Baroque, or Neoclassical, for instance) can be similarly problematic.
    • A colonial Latin American church or a painting might display several styles, with the result looking different from anything we might see in Spain, Italy, or France.
    • A Mexican featherwork, for example, might borrow its subject from a Flemish print and display shading and modeling consistent with classicizing Renaissance painting, but it is made entirely of feathers-how do we categorize such an artwork?
  • It is important that we not view Spanish colonial art as completely breaking with the traditions of the pre-Hispanic past, as unoriginal, or as lacking great artists.
  • The essays and videos found here reveal the innovation, adaptation, and negotiation of traditions from around the globe, and speak to the dynamic nature of the Americas in the early modern period.

Latin America Today

  • Today, Latin America is considered by many scholars to be an imprecise and highly problematic term, since it prescribes a collective entity to a conglomerate of countries that remain vastly different.
  • In the case of countries that share the same language their cultural bond is much stronger, since despite their potentially different pre-conquest origins, they continue to share collective colonial histories and contemporary postcolonial predicaments.
  • Spanish-speaking countries are therefore known as Spanish America or Hispanoamérica, while those that were colonized by the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal, fall under the broader category of Iberoamérica, thus including Brazil.
  • In addition to these Latin-derived languages, indigenous tongues like Quechua, spoken by more than 8 million people in South America, are still preserved today.
  • When discussing countries such as the French-speaking Haiti and Spanish-speaking Mexico, the similarities become much harder to articulate.
  • That said, the collective experiences of the conquest, slavery, and imperialism—and even today, those of underdevelopment, environmental degradation, poverty, and inequality-prove to be an undeniable unifying force, and as the artworks of these countries demonstrate, the idea of both a collective and local experience exists among the selected countries.
  • For the purposes of clarity, the term Latin America is used loosely, whether referring to the pre- or post-conquest era.
  • At the same time however, this term will be challenged in order to demonstrate both the limitations and benefits of thinking of Latin American art as a shared artistic tradition.
  • It is anachronistic to discuss a Latin American artistic tradition before independence, and as a result pre-Columbian and colonial art are discussed according to specific regions.
  • However, it is best to approach the art of the 19th and 20th centuries as a whole, in large part due to the emergence of Latin Americanism and Pan-Americanism (a twentieth-century movement that rallied all American countries around a shared political, economic, and social agenda).
  • Contemporary artists working in a globalized art world and often times outside of their country of origin give new meaning to what it means to not necessarily be a Latin American artist, but rather a global one.