Ananda Cohen-Aponte - Visual Repertoires of Resistance and Counterinsurgency in the Eighteenth-Century Andes
This presentation focuses on the production and modification of visual and material culture as a form of world-making by considering case studies from the Tupac Amaru and Katari Rebellions of the southern Andes (1780s). I explore the parallel ad-hoc strategies enacted by both rebels and counterinsurgent forces to manipulate the visual world in the service of political projects, including pictorial effacement (the repainting of portraits, the modification of material objects); the repurposing of power-laden objects associated with colonial authority; and the implantation of visual infrastructures of control reflected in contemporaneous cartography and official portraiture. This presentation offers new insights for writing about art produced within periods of political violence, underscoring the gains that can be made through nuanced archival analysis, consideration of the heterogeneous temporality of objects, and modern technologies such as infrared photography and x-ray analysis of artworks.
Ananda Cohen-Aponte is Associate Professor of History of Art at Cornell University who works on the visual culture of colonial Latin America, with special interests in issues of cross-cultural exchange, historicity, identity, and anti-colonial movements.
Her recent book, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes (University of Texas Press, 2016) explores the intersections between art, politics, religion, and society in mural paintings located in colonial churches across the southern Andes. This work draws on a wealth of archival and primary source research to understand the ways that artists appropriated European religious iconography to articulate local narratives, transforming the medium of muralism into a powerful barometer of indigenous and mestizo life under Spanish colonial rule. She also served as editor and primary author of the book Pintura colonial cusqueña: el esplendor del arte en los Andes/Paintings of Colonial Cusco: Artistic Splendor in the Andes, published as separate Spanish and English-language editions (Haynanka Ediciones, 2015). Her essays appear in a range of journals and edited volumes, including Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas, Allpanchis, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, among others. She is currently working on a new book project that explores the role of the visual arts in fomenting an insurgent imaginary in late 18th-century Peru and Bolivia within a context of inter-ethnic conflict and rebellion.
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Presented by the Department of Art History as part of the 2021/22 Smart Lecture series supported by the Smart Family Foundation.
This convening is open to all invitees who are compliant with UChicago vaccination requirements and, because of ongoing health risks, particularly to the unvaccinated, participants are expected to adopt the risk mitigation measures (masking and social distancing, etc.) appropriate to their vaccination status as advised by public health officials or to their individual vulnerabilities as advised by a medical professional. Public convening may not be safe for all and carries a risk for contracting COVID-19, particularly for those unvaccinated. Participants will not know the vaccination status of others and should follow appropriate risk mitigation measures.
Image caption: Cuzco School. Our Lady of Mount Carmel, possibly 1780s. Oil on canvas with wood case, canvas: 42 x 31 in. (106.7 x 78.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum of Art