Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico

FAIN: GI-50373-11

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA 90036-4504)
Virginia Fields (Project Director: January 2011 to July 2011)
Victoria I. Lyall (Project Director: August 2011 to June 2013)

Implementation of a traveling exhibition, a catalog, and public programs on artistic trends in Mesoamerica from 950 through 1521 CE and on the persistence of native traditions and identity after the Spanish conquest.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is requesting a $400,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the implementation of a major traveling exhibition, Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico, and 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.

Associated Products

Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico (Catalog)
Title: Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico
Author: Virginia M. Fields
Author: Victoria I. Lyall
Author: John M. D. Pohl
Abstract: Recent scholarship demonstrates that a confederacy of city-states in southern Mexico, largely dominated by Nahua, Mixtec, and Zapotec nobility, successfully resisted both Aztec and Spanish subjugation. Children of the Plumed Serpent explores the extraordinary wonders in fresco, codices, polychrome ceramics, gold, turquoise, shell, textiles, featherwork and other precious materials that were produced by these confederacies between AD 1200 and 1500, as their influence spread throughout Mesoamerica by means of vast networks of trade and exchange. A ruling class of nobles, or caciques, believing that Quetzalcoatl, the human incarnation of the Plumed Serpent, had founded their royal lineages, called themselves the "Children of the Plumed Serpent"; they resurrected themselves and continued to affect cultural development in Mesoamerica during a dramatic period of social transformation.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/children-plumed-serpent-legacy-quetzalcoatl-ancient-mexico
Catalog Type: Exhibition Catalog
Publisher: Scala Publishers Limited

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