Children of the Plumed Serpent: Art and Ritual of Mesoamerica's Late Antiquity

FAIN: GE-50318-10

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA 90036-4504)
Virginia Fields (Project Director: January 2010 to June 2011)
Victoria I. Lyall (Project Director: June 2011 to December 2011)

Planning of a traveling exhibition, a catalog, and programs on the cultural and artistic traditions in Mesoamerica during the Postclassic period (AD 1000-1521) and their transformation through the Colonial period to the present.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is requesting a $40,000 planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the planning and development of a major traveling exhibition, Children of the Plumed Serpent: Art and Ritual of Mesoamerica's Late Antiquity. With its accompanying scholarly catalogue and multiple interpretive programs, this exhibition will be the first systematic investigation of the diversity of cultural and artistic traditions in Mesoamerica during the period referred to as Postclassic (AD 1000-1521) in the archaeological literature. Extending its reach into the present day, the exhibition's innovative approach illuminates the social and cultural complexities of late pre-Columbian and early colonial eras as expressed in the art of the period and examines the enduring nature of these complexities in contemporary Mesoamerican societies.