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Lecture: Color on Maps

Indigenous Mexican mapmakers created extraordinary maps of cities and rural territories in the 1500s. These painters often deployed broad fields of color in hues that were based on visible observation, but sometimes not. What was the meaning of color to these artists? Was the application of pigment meaningful in the contests to territory that erupted after the Spanish invasion of the sixteenth century? Was it a form of ecological knowledge? In this talk, art historian Barbara Mundy explores the image-making traditions of Central Mexican Indigenous communities and their relationship to ecological knowledge and the possession of territory.

ÀϾÅÆ·²è the speaker: Barbara E. Mundy is the Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History, Tulane University. Her scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. Mundy interest in the social construction of space and its imaginary bore fruit in her first book, The Mapping of New Spain. More recently, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City draws on Mexica texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography, revealing the city nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century. Her current research focuses on the production of books in the sixteenth century in New Spain, with particular emphasis on the books of Nahuatl speakers in the Basin of Mexico.