Location: Graduate Club
155 Elm Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Open to: Yale Community Only
Description: “Between Sombreros and Diadems: a pictorial testament from colonial central Mexico”
This talk centers on two pictorial documents from Central Mexico produced in the late sixteenth century that deal with the property distribution of an elite Indigenous individual named don Miguel Damian after his death. Through careful visual analysis of the specific graphic choices present in these documents, I show how they offer a peek into the interstitial spaces generated by the conquest, spaces in which modes of recording, family structure, and expressive choices capture lived experiences in the process of radical cultural change between the pre-Hispanic past and colonial reality.
Catalina Ospina is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. She will join Yale’s history of art department as assistant professor in 2024. Catalina got her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Art History. She studies the material culture of pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America, with a focus on the Andean region. Her research examines the intersections between material culture and embodied practices, with a particular interest in understanding knowledge-making beyond alphabetic writing.