Contemporary pre-Columbian art: recasting artifacts through object biographies

Unburied from layers of dirt, recovered from subterranean tombs, or stumbled upon during a traipse in the jungle, pre‐Columbian artifacts have sparked a curiosity in their discoverers since before the Spanish Conquest. Their strange appearance, masterful execution, and illegible hieroglyphs have confounded explorers and archaeologists avant la lettre. Though scholars have resolved many of the mysteries of pre‐Columbian objects, they continue to perform a representational duty that exceeds an intellectual interest. Beginning in the seventeenth century, but reaching an apex in the nineteenth century, certain Aztec images and objects were marshaled around a Mexican national identity with its epicenter in Mexico City, previously the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán. The Calendar Stone, Coatlicue Statue, and image of the eagle atop a prickly pear cactus were heralded as central iconic figures that could unite a fragmented Mexican population after Independence. Museums collected and consolidated the artifacts resulting both from government‐sponsored archaeological excavations and informal digs in peripheral communities. Though this Aztec‐centric national identity was intended to corral the citizens around a common set of mutually agreed upon images, the government practices continued to disenfranchise the outlaying communities most heavily impacted by the policies of colonization and coloniality. ❧ In the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, Mexican artists have grappled with this representational legacy. This dissertation examines three contemporary artists who reinterpret pre‐Columbian visual culture to challenge the Aztec‐centric national identity promulgated in the nineteenth‐century. The three artists under consideration are Tatiana Parcero, Mariana Castillo Deball, and Demián Flores. I analyze a few key works by each artist through an object biography methodology that traces the pre‐Columbian object from its original manufacture to its acquisition in a U.S. or European institution to its most recent iteration in contemporary art. Through the object biography approach, I can more fully unpack the different circumstances of these objects’ existence, and their corresponding ontological and epistemological changes over time. I argue that these artists employ the materials and technologies of archaeological representation, including black‐and‐white photography, plaster casts, and oil painting, to critically examine the role of archaeology in underwriting an Aztec‐centric national identity. Structuring the dissertation is the theoretical framework of decoloniality, which insists on the continued repercussion of historical colonialism for source communities and pre‐Columbian objects.