Painting in the New World: A Symposium on Spanish Colonial Art

This program is supported by a grant from Arizona Humanities.

Accompanying the exhibit Masterworks of Spanish Colonial Art from the Phoenix Art Museum’s Collection, this symposium seeks to enrich visitor understanding of the artworks and their cultural significance. Themes include the intersections between culture, religion, society, and politics at the heart of artistic production.

From the Phoenix Art Museum website:

“This landmark symposium will present an overarching view of artistic traditions in Colonial Latin America for a general audience.

Organized to accompany the exhibition Masterworks of Spanish Colonial Art from the Phoenix Art Museum’s Collection, this symposium will enrich your understanding of the 18^th-century paintings on display.

This evening of talks will present new perspectives on how art was created and disseminated throughout the Spanish viceroyalties. How were paintings commissioned during the colonial period? How did indigenous artistic traditions continue to be reflected in art created in the viceroyalties? How did native artists transform artistic source material imported from Europe into distinctive and original artworks? The symposium speakers will address these questions, and more.

In addition, the symposium has been organized in tandem with the first exhibition in Phoenix of an 18^th-century painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe—the Patron Saint of the Hispanic Americas—and our keynote speaker will shed light on the history and traditions surrounding this iconic image.”