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The ancient and colonial Americas are marked by unions and transformations of different cosmologies, epistemologies, and social structures. Within such dynamic systems, gendered identities were configured and understood along a broad spectrum and became manifest through visual culture, space, and embodiment. Sometimes these productions revealed meaningful concordances in gender ideologies across cultural and political divides and, at other times, articulated ruptures that challenged dominant gender models and their visual manifestations. By exploring how gender ideologies were communicated in visual culture, performance, and dedicated spaces of the ancient and colonial Americas, this session will show that, in both cases, what emerged were complex and, sometimes, nuanced strategies that both dominant and marginalized groups exercised in their visual, spatial, and performative practices. These speak to how visual culture could be used to maintain or contest gendered ideologies in the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural states of the Americas.