Engaged with Pre-Columbian Art
Modern and contemporary art that draws on the Olmec, Maya, Mexica, Andean and other arts of the Americas before conquest.
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About
Artists across the Americas and beyond have looked to the art made before European conquest by the Olmec, Maya, Mexica (Aztec), Inca and other peoples for forms, symbols and a sense of deep history. In Mexico after the Revolution that past became a national emblem, and Rufino Tamayo collected ancient ceramics whose weight and earthy colour entered his own painting.
The influence travelled far. Henry Moore took the reclining pose of the chacmool from Chichén Itzá as a model for his reclining figures, Josef Albers photographed pyramids on trips to Mexico and titled a 1943 abstraction Tenayuca, and Joaquín Torres-García in Montevideo built grids of symbols inspired by Andean stonework and textiles. Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House (1919–21) borrowed the massing of Maya temples. The Peruvian painter Tilsa Tsuchiya drew on Andean myth, and Mariana Castillo Deball turns codices and archaeological objects into installations about how the past is recorded.
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Engagement with Mass Media
Equestrian
Erotic
Eye Contact
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Face
Failure
Family
Femininity
Figure from the Back (Rückenfigur)
Figure Studies
Figures in Nature
Figures of the Art World
Flora
Focus on the Social Margins
Food
Gender
Glamour
Globalization
