The essays in Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America coedited by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt, offer a full-throated call for the decolonization of colonial Latin American art history. The volume takes its inspiration from two recent critical interventions in approaches to colonial Latin American art history. The first, Susan Verdi Webster’s groundbreaking scholarship that repopulates the Audiencia of Quito’s (Ecuador) art world with previously unrecognized Indigenous artists/artisans and their artistic practices. The second, Barbara E. Mundy’s and Aaron M. Hyman’s critique of the Vasarian “life-work model” (2015). Such a model, they argue, that typically privileges white European male artists and relies heavily on textual sources, is of limited use in the reconstruction of artists and their artworlds embedded in colonial structures of power and racialized hierarchies. Framed within this critique of the methods, models, and values enshrined in Eurocentric art theory, Stanfield-Mazzi and Vargas-Betancourt emphasize the need “to challenge previous forms of inquiry or run the risk of producing colonialist scholarship” (9). An introduction and conclusion complement seven chapters that range across the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries with a geographical focus on Mexico, Peru, and Cuba.

Stanfield-Mazzi explores Indigenous artists’ activism for their own rights in sixteenth-century Mexico and Peru while asking “what sorts of rights were possible for negotiation at the time” (47). Faced with the demands of forced labor tribute (repartimiento) after the abolition of Indigenous slavery and restructuring of the encomienda—a grant of rights to Indigenous labor, not to land as the author erroneously defines it—artists sought exemption from the requirement to maximize their labor time for their own work. The author’s analysis of debates over labor demands demonstrates how Indigenous artisans succeeded in gaining exemption from labor service in 1565 through corporative collaboration. We find similar developments in Peru although the author argues that artisans’ advocacy occurred on an individual, rather than a collaborative basis.

Jennifer R. Saracino focuses on the Colegio de Santa Cruz founded by Franciscans in Mexico City in 1536 to train the sons of Indigenous elites. She argues that, as a site of artistic training, the Colegio provided opportunities for collaborative artistic production and facilitated Indigenous students’ social mobility. Her approach provides a fresh reading of the creation of three well-known manuscripts produced at the Colegio de Santa Cruz: the Florentine Codex, the Badianus Herbal, and the Mapa Uppsala. In addition to the Indigenous artists, Saracino acknowledges individuals not typically associated with art making but who were integral to the manuscripts’ creation given their particular expertise such as the Aztec merchants with their hydrographic knowledge of the Valley of Mexico (Mapa Uppsala).

Vargas-Betancourt complements Saracino’s discussion of agents of the “art world” with her case study of Angelina Martina, an Indigenous merchant in sixteenth-century Mexico City. Close reading of several key documents, including Martina’s will (1580) reveals her role as a supplier of materials such as featherwork and textiles used in the production of luxury objects. The author’s analysis emphasizes how Martina navigated the cultural traditions and conventions of both Indigenous and Spanish art worlds and economies to protect her status and wealth.

Derek S. Burdette moves us to seventeenth and eighteenth-century Mexico to reconstruct artists’ agency and artistic practice as “experts” in technical examinations of purported miraculous images to assess claims of divine authorship or “miraculous behavior” such as bleeding or sweating (127). Burdette asks how “artists performed their expertise in ways that were entirely removed from the act of making art, and yet were part of what it meant to be a practicing artist in colonial Mexico” (118). The author provides detailed descriptions of the artists’ engagement with the objects as they scrutinized and assessed their material characteristics. His argument that participation in such investigations generated social capital for artists “without a brush or chisel in hand” (109) is persuasive up to a point. Other parts of his discussion are less so, such as his explanation of the artists’ recruitment for the 1666 examination of the tilma (cape) of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Burdette argues that the notary’s report of the examination did not include the artists’ biographies and their “masterpieces” (120), only their ages and years of experience as painters, and so the basis for their selection must be sought elsewhere. Burdette points to the artists’ “practical experience” and their ethnic identities as Spanish and criollo painters (120).  Aside from a questionable assessment of the painters’ reputations, the author’s expectation that their artworks would have been individually listed, much less categorized anachronistically as “masterpieces” strikes me as unrealistic and weakens his argument. Setting such concerns aside, Burdette makes the case for the importance of these understudied examinations, the attention they draw to facture, and the shaping of artists’ status as “interpreters of divine intervention” (109).

Emily C. Floyd’s masterful case study focuses on a “true portrait” of the Virgin Mary commissioned by a Spanish colonial official, Juan María de Guevara y Cantos. The portrait, reproduced in his devotional text Corona de la divinissima María, published in Lima in 1644, included engravings created by a Madrid-based French engraver and a Lima-based Spanish goldsmith. Since the original painting of the Virgin Mary by an “indio pintor” commissioned by Guevara y Cantos, has been lost, Floyd turns to his narrative, archival documents, and a single print of the engraving of the portrait (the author’s fortuitous discovery) to delve into the Corona’s creation and restore the artists’ agency and identities. She traces the contradictions that the visual and archival evidence reveal when compared with Guevara y Cantos’s narration of the portrait’s creation. Both the goldsmith/engraver and the painter are unnamed in the narrative. However, the single print bears the Spanish goldsmith’s signature and identifies him as Diego de Figueroa, resident in Lima. Close reading of archival documents and stylistic elements in the engraving of the “true portrait” enables Floyd to identify the “indio pintor” as Mateo Mexía, a painter based in Quito, and “whose work likely served as the model for the engraving” (145). As Floyd exposes the unreliability of Guevara y Cantos’s account, she also cautions against uncritical acceptance of Mexía’s ethnicity as Indigenous. Rather, “inconclusive” (161) archival documentation points to the instability of Mexía’s ethnicity as he moved between Spanish or Indigenous depending on which ethnicity benefited him.

Ananda Cohen-Aponte’s chapter provides a sophisticated analysis of political violence in late eighteenth-century Peru and “art-making and art-breaking” (169). Focused on the Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari rebellions against Spanish colonial rule, she stresses the documentary record’s richness generated by the rebellions and their aftermath for understanding the relevance of the visual and the material to such movements. Rebels and royalists alike “commissioned portraits, medallions, religious images, and banners depicting key events, leaders, and patron saints associated with their cause” (169). Confessions and testimony shed light on the roles and identities of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous artists, contemporary perceptions of images and power, as well as valuable descriptions of artworks that have disappeared, were destroyed, censored, or repainted. Particularly compelling is her discussion of how portraits generated support for the rebellions and could become avatars for their subjects. For example, one of two known portraits of  Amaru was hung from the gallows in the town of Tinta in 178—“death by effigy” (177). The Spanish king’s image on coins was subjected to defacement. For the author, the broader significance of such actions allows us to see their authors “as multifaceted political actors who created and intervened in works of art in a moment of acute social conflict. Creative approaches to the visual and archival record can serve as a form of restorative justice for those who have been scorned, vilified, and dispossessed by history” (193).

Linda Marie Rodriguez’s chapter (a posthumous inclusion) analyzes the 1791 trial of Pedro Dionisio Muñoz de Carballo, a free man of color, and owner of three paint and general goods shops in Havana, Cuba. The trial focused on allegations that he had sold poisonous pigments to enslaved individuals who could use them to murder their owners. Rodriguez situates her analysis within the changing economic and political contexts characterized by the expansion of slave-based sugar production by Cuban planters. Such expansion, combined with news of slave revolts in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) triggered fear and racial anxiety among the white elites. Rodriguez asserts that Muñoz de Carballo’s trial also presaged “the emergence of aesthetic discourses among white elites that aimed to disenfranchise Black artists, who had previously dominated artistic production in the colony” (201). We learn how Muñoz de Carballo maneuvered his professional multiracial networks to assemble witnesses to testify on his behalf to secure both his freedom and livelihood. We also gain a deeper understanding of painters’ knowledge of pigments and materials and the prevalence of mural painting. This is a vibrant analysis that captures the intersections of the law, racialization and the art world, and its Afro-Cuban artists.

In Hyman and Mundy’s concluding essay they argue that the essays “point the way toward thinking about artistic subjectivities in Latin America—and in other parts of the world—as situational, contingent, and intersectional” (235). Their essay offers incisive reflections on both the volume’s contributions and limitations. I would quibble with their assertion that some of the authors’ findings “square imprecisely with recent attempts to position such artists as fundamentally concerned, like their European counterparts, with the status of the visual arts as “‘liberal’ rather than ‘mechanical’” (235). Aside from compelling evidence that painters in colonial Mexico, to cite only one case, were concerned that their art should be perceived as a “liberal” one, I am unclear why and how such concerns “square imprecisely” and why they need to “square” at all? As we deepen our knowledge of artists’ techniques, interests, and networks, inside and outside of their workshops, why should these be framed as “instead of,” rather than “as well as”? Artists’ lives were multifaceted; their particular expertise could involve them, for example, in collaborations for the design and building of triumphal arches and catafalques, compilation of inventories and estate appraisals, training of apprentices, management of entrepreneurial interests, and confraternity matters—all in a day’s work. Hyman and Mundy also query whether an emphasis on the recovery of Indigenous agency risks approaches where indigeneity becomes “the only artistic experience that one is expected to account for in studying art produced in colonial Latin America?” (234). To my reading, the essays point to a much wider range of questions and methodological challenges.

One of the volume’s many strengths is its emphasis on the particularities of racialized politics, aesthetics, and artmaking in different parts of the Spanish empire at different times. Homogeneous they were not. Floyd’s caution, for example, regarding the uncritical acceptance of artists’ specified racial labels is well taken. On this point, it is worth noting that a marker that is underdeveloped in these essays is that of class and the larger art economy. We only have very hazy knowledge, for example, of artists’ costs of maintaining a workshop and household, profits and losses, and economic barriers that prevented many aspiring artists from becoming masters. I also found it surprising, given the volume’s laudable commitment to a decolonized art history that no scholars’ voices from outside the US academy were included. Many of the arguments will generate debate, especially the editors’ bold claim that as the authors “only rarely recur to the usual art historical methods of formal analysis and iconography . . . they offer us a new method, one in which a decolonial lens is used to examine artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it” (14). That said, these essays succeed in persuading us to look beyond the singular artist and completed canvas, and to acknowledge the plurality of artworlds, artistic practices, and agendas. Collective Creativity is a significant addition to recent innovative approaches to colonial Latin American art such as Gabriela Siracusano’s and Agustina Rodríguez Romero’s edited collection, Materia Americana. El cuerpo de las imágenes hispanoamericanas (siglos XVI a mediados del XIX) (Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, 2020) with its deep dive into the materiality of objects and images. Specialists in colonial Latin American art history and visual/material culture studies will learn much from this volume, and nonspecialists will find it an excellent introduction to the field; clearly written and jargon-free essays also make it accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students. 

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“A contributor to this volume, Jennifer R. Saracino, is currently the Field Editor for Latin American Art at caa.reviews, and a second contributor, Aaron M. Hyman, is a previous Editorial Board member. Neither were involved in the commissioning or editing of this review.”