Beyond the Image: Mesoamerican Color

FAIN: GI-290857-23

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA 90036-4504)
Diana Magaloni (Project Director: August 2022 to present)

Implementation of a traveling exhibition on the role and practice of polychromy in Mesoamerican art from ancient cultures to contemporary Indigenous communities, including a catalog and online resources.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) respectfully requests a $400,000 implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Beyond the Image: Mesoamerican Color, a traveling exhibition on view in Los Angeles, CA (Sept 2024 - Feb 2025) and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (Spring 2025). Beyond the Image will showcase more than 200 exemplary artworks and artmarking implements from all major cultural regions of Mesoamerica, spanning three millennia of artistic practice, and including contemporary works by living Indigenous artists. This ambitious project brings decades of interdisciplinary research on Mesoamerican color and artmaking to public audiences for the first time. Curated by Dr. Diana Magaloni, Program Director of the Art of the Ancient Americas, and Dr. Alyce de Carteret, Postdoctoral Fellow, Art of the Ancient Americas, it will be accompanied by a catalogue and an array of interpretive humanities and educational programs.

Associated Products

We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art (Exhibition)
Title: We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art
Curator: Diana Magaloni, Ph.D.
Curator: Alyce de Carteret, Ph.D.
Abstract: Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they (quite literally) made the world. The power of color emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. Color mapped the very order of the cosmos, of time and space. By engineering and deploying color, artists wielded the power of cosmic creation in their hands. We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. Histories of colonialism and industrialization in the “color-averse” West have minimized the deep significance of color in the Indigenous Americas. This exhibition follows two interconnected lines of inquiry—technical and material analyses, and Indigenous conceptions of art and image—to reach the full richness of color at the core of Mesoamerican worldviews.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: http://https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/we-live-painting-nature-color-mesoamerican-art
Primary URL Description: LACMA.org exhibition webpage

We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art (Catalog)
Title: We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art
Author: Diana Magaloni
Author: Alyce de Carteret
Abstract: Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they (quite literally) made the world. The power of color emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. Color mapped the very order of the cosmos, of time and space. By engineering and deploying color, artists wielded the power of cosmic creation in their hands. We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. Histories of colonialism and industrialization in the “color-averse” West have minimized the deep significance of color in the Indigenous Americas. This exhibition follows two interconnected lines of inquiry—technical and material analyses, and Indigenous conceptions of art and image—to reach the full richness of color at the core of Mesoamerican worldviews.
Year: 2024
Catalog Type: Exhibition Catalog
Publisher: DelMonico Books/Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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