The Diálogos Thoma: Re-Examining the Future of Art from the Past

This paper introduces the session by examining the role of the Thoma Foundation in advancing scholarship in the field of art of the Spanish Americas to explore Indigenous and European pictorial traditions that fused into hybrid art forms and complex realities and lesser-known histories in this contested period of art history. This presentation will examine the recent publication edited by Marilynn Thoma fellows in two volumes in the Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture journal as a case study to highlight how the Thoma Foundation has helped fellows contribute bilingual publications and set new trajectories for collaborating internationally with scholars in Latin America. This project authored by Katherine Moore McAllen and Verónica Muñoz-Nájar Luque embodies the potential for scholars in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Asia to collaborate in an international conference in Lima and then publish hemispheric conversations shared on free online platforms.

This paper will also present new research funded by the Thoma Post-doctoral fellowship examining the role of viticulture in the production of art in viceregal Peru, which funded the construction of churches in Ica and Nazca as well as art in cities further afield in Lima, Cusco, and Arequipa. My research as a Thoma fellow has helped uncover new information about secular owners’ vineyard estates and bodegas producing pisco that played a role in the production of art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper will contribute to new trajectories for studying Spanish colonial visual culture.