Arts of the Americas: The Continents Before Columbus and Cortés

Pre-Hispanic visual culture will be the focus of this class. We will cross on both Mesoamerica and the Andes. In Central America, our focus will be on the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec cultures; in the Andes, we will focus on the lowland Paracas, Nazca, and Moche, along with the highland Chavín, Wari, Tiahuanaco, and Inka city-states. Along with architecture, textiles, manuscripts, metallurgy, and sculpted works, we will consider primary sources and current debates in art history and archaeology. Early theorists of pre-Columbian art such as George Kubler, Junius Bird, Octavio Paz, Zelia Nuttall, Marilyn Bridges, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff will be discussed in conjunction with more recent scholarship by Anne Paul, Elizabeth Boone, and Dorie Reents, among many others. Among the themes we will discuss: questions of cultural patrimony, art historical methodology, archaeological theory, the politics of collecting and museum exhibitions, and relationships between art historical and anthropological modes of interpretation. To this end, the class will utilize the objects and libraries available at the major collections of pre-Columbian art in New York City: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its Goldwater Library and the American Museum of Natural History and its library.