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Transforming Images
New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds
376 pages | 91 color/114 b&w illustrations/3 maps | 9 x 10 | 2006
ISBN 978-0-271-02690-9 | cloth: $89.95
Paperback edition is not available in the U.S.
“Transforming Images is an oversize volume that
combines the aesthetic values of a coffee table book
with deeply theoretical and well-researched academic articles. Especially notable are the 91 color and 114 black and white images that beautifully supplement and illustrate the textual arguments. It is in the specifics of simultaneous, multiple, and unresolved meanings that this text is most provocative and it is in this way it serves as a model for other works.” —Michael L. Trujillo, Museum Anthropology
“Overall, the volume and its authors display an impressive breadth and thoroughness of research. The book itself contains a remarkable quality of images, many of which are color. Furthermore, anyone searching for more details on santos will be delighted to find the exhaustive endnotes and twenty-four page consolidated bibliography.” —Lauren Grace Kilroy, CAA Reviews
“Together with the other contributors, these authors investigate anthropological, historical, demographic, and ethical questions bearing on this art. They have produced a book to be reckoned with by all serious students of the subject.” —C.W. Talbot, Choice
“This heady book will serve as a basis for scholarly inquiry on the subject of New Mexican santos and santeros for years to come, and is a solid contribution to the field.” —Charles Bennett, New Mexico Magazine
“This manuscript is quite unlike anything yet published on New Mexican colonial-period material. Long overdue, it not only brings together a wealth of new material, but it also addresses the region with an academic sophistication and respect that has been lacking, problematizing religious artworks with a strong theoretical underpinning and an interdisciplinary approach. Overall, the anthology chides and corrects conventional Eurocentric scholarship that devotes most attention to categorizing and identifying iconographic and stylistic patterns and continues to be inattentive to the reception, function, and bicultural production of artifacts. Particularly noteworthy is the effort to underscore the strong indigenous influence in colonial arts through both authorship and artistic/cultural influences during the campaign to evangelize and Hispanize the Amerindian population. By and large, the artworks are situated in a well researched social, political, historical context with the primary focus on how Santos are made, or seen, to operate.” —Jeanette Favrot Peterson, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Style” has been one of the cornerstones not only of the modern discipline of art history but also of social and cultural history. In this volume, the writers consider the inadequacy of the concept of style as essential to a person, people, place, or period. While the subject matter of this book is specific to religious practices and artifacts from New Mexico between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the implications of these investigations arefar reaching historically, methodologically, and theoretically.
The essays collected here explore the Catholic instruments of religious devotion produced in New Mexico from around 1760 until the radical transformation of the tradition in the twentieth century. The writers in this volume make three key arguments. First, they make a case for bringing new theoretical perspectives and research strategies to bear on the New Mexican materials and other colonial contexts. Second, they demonstrate that the New Mexican materials providean excellent case study for rethinking many of the most fundamental questions in art-historical and anthropological study. Third, the authors collectively argue that the New Mexican images had, andstill have, importance to diverse audiences and makers.
The distinctiveness of New Mexican santos consists not only in their subjects (which conformed to Catholic Reformation tastes) but also in elements that may appear to have been “merely decorative”:graphically striking and frequently elaborate abstract design motifs and landscape references. Despite their anonymity, the images are,as a group, readily distinguished from local products anywhere elsein the Spanish colonial world. This distinctiveness suggests that we should inquire not so much about the individual identities of their makers as about the collective identity of the society and place that produced and used them.
Claire Farago is Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Paragone”: A Critical Interpretationwith a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas (1992).
Contents
,br />Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
Problems for Interpretation
Mediating Ethnicity and Culture
The Semiotics of Images
Reception of Sources in New Mexico
Interleaf A: Political Allusions
Reconstructing Ethnicity
Formative Era, 16931700
Dynamic Ethnicity in Eighteenth Century
Interleaf B: Research and Human Genome
Hybrid Households
Christian Icons, Theory and History
The Early Santeros
Interleaf C: The Life of an Artist
Hide Painting: Archival Evidence
Hide Paintings, Sources
Transforming Images
Interleaf D: Sound, Image, Identity
Inventing Modern Identities
Competing Religious Discourses
Tradition Reconfigured
Problems of Attribution
Santos in Contemporary Life
Interleaf E: Catholicism and Pueblos
Epilogue
Re(f)using Art
Notes
Consolidated Bibliography
Contributors
Photo Credits
Index