The broad curriculum in the arts of Precolumbian America offered by Jeanette F. Peterson spans three millennia and a geographic range from Andean South America to Mesoamerica. Of necessity interdisciplinary, the study of Precolumbian art and architecture addresses the social practices, political economies and religious beliefs integral to these complex cultural formations. Additional undergraduate courses and most graduate seminars intersect with Peterson’s research interests in the arts of Spain and colonial Latin America. This scholarship pursues the complex discourse between European and Amerindian traditions, including issues of hybridity, the imaging of women, Marian cults and the subjectivity of seeing.

Graduate seminars have included text and image relationships in sixteenth-century colonial manuscripts (one was held jointly with UCLA at the Getty Center), the mapping of the sacred in the Americas, and the ritualized nature of Precolumbian art making. The latter resulted in an exhibition with catalogue at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art where Latin American art has received considerable attention and UCSB students have assisted in recent exhibitions. Current doctoral students are working on sixteenth-century Tupi featherworking in Brazil, the fotonovela in Argentina, ritual spaces in the Franciscan monastery of Izamal, Yucatan, and portraiture in eighteenth-century Lima and Buenos Aires.

Students interested in this field benefit from faculty within the department whose expertise falls outside of the canonical European domain or whose interests benefit from postcolonial theory. Fruitful collaboration also occurs when students work with our several early modernists, since the arts transported to Spain and then overseas in large quantities shaped colonial visual culture and, conversely, in a true global network, the New World left its stamp on the Old.

Coverage of Latin American visual culture is greatly enhanced by the addition of two new faculty members in the Chicano Studies Program who are adjunct professors in History of Art. Gerardo Aldana works in the area of Maya art, epigraphy and technological culture, and Guisela Latorre is a modernist whose recent scholarship has focused on Chicano/a murals. Extra departmental strengths at UCSB also include Latin America and Iberian Studies (LAIS) as well as professors in Anthropology (Katharina Schreiber in Andean archeology) and History (Sarah Klein and Cecilia Mendez in colonial Mexico and South America respectively) whose mentorship enriches the department’s offerings.