Gild Recent PhD Lecture: Ximena Gómez
Spanish Statue, Chachapoya Image: “Other Hybridities” in Lima’s Virgin of Copacabana
This talk uses Lima’s Virgin of Copacabana to consider the “other hybridities” that Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn have called for art historians to explore in colonial visual culture. The Marian sculpture was commissioned by a small Indigenous confraternity in 1588 and, after the image performed a miracle in 1591, evolved into one of the most popular Virgins in the city. Rather than discuss the Virgin of Copacabana only in terms of its Spanish artists and European influences, this talk shifts the focus of study to the sodality that founded the image’s cult. The community was co-founded by a group of self-identified Chachapoya people, an ethnic group from the northern cloud forests of Peru that infamously aided the Spanish against the Inca. I place the Virgin of Copacabana in visual dialog with Chachapoya art, architecture, and cultural practices in order to suggest ways that these confraternity members interrelated with their sacred image. Considering the image primarily in terms of its adherents reveals that even when interacting with a “European-looking” object, through Catholic ritual, under colonial rule, Indigenous histories and beliefs had space to flourish.
Ximena A. Gómez, Assistant Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Ximena Gómez received her PhD from the University of Michigan and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A specialist in the art of colonial Peru, her work contends with the erasure of Indigenous and Black people by using extensive archival evidence and purposefully centering Andean and West African epistemologies in analyses of visually “European” artworks. She is on leave this with a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral to complete her first book, tentatively titled Indigenous and Black Confraternities and the Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima.
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