Over the past 15 years, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has acquired, piece by piece, a new collection that it now presents: Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500-1800, an exhibition showcasing the paintings, sculptures, textiles, and other decorative arts that the collection contains. Of the more than 90 exhibits, just over 20 are on view in a museum for the first time. The exhibition runs from June 12 to October 30.
»Spanish america was neither a homogeneous nor a monolithic entity, and local artists were not passive absorbers of foreign traditions«, says curator Ilona Katzew, explaining the motivation for the exhibition. The colonization and Christianization of what was then called the »New World« was a complex social process. Latin American artists found creative ways to combine the imposed European culture with their own. The region became a center of global trade, which is why one contemporary writer called it the »archive of the world«.
