Ximena Gómez

Assistant Professor | American Art

Faculty
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Contact
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Location
South College W319

Ximena A. Gómez is Assistant Professor of American Art. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College, her MA from Tufts University, and her PhD from the University of Michigan. She specializes in the art and visual culture of the Viceroyalty of Peru and that of colonial Latin America more broadly. Her scholarly and teaching interests also include popular images of the Virgin Mary, miracle-working images, and the activation of the pre-invasion and colonial past in US Latinx art.

Research Areas

Her first book, In the Hands of Devotees: Indigenous and Black Confraternities and the Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima (University of Texas Press, 2025), examines the visual culture of confraternities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima. In addition to highlighting the roles Indigenous and Black people played in artistic and religious expression, her book is the first monographic treatment of confraternal art in the viceregal Peruvian capital. She contends with the erasure of Indigenous and Black people from colonial Lima's art history through the use of extensive archival evidence, and centers subaltern epistemologies by considering the visual culture of the Andes and West Africa in analyses of imported European artworks.

Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Fulbright-Hays commission, a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (Advanced Quechua), the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Michigan. 

Publications

  • In the Hands of Devotees: Indigenous and Black Confraternities and the Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima (University of Texas Press, 2025). [Link]
  • “Nuestra Señora del Mal Querer: Marian Imagery and Rosalía’s Ascent to Pop Urbano Royalty,” “Race-ing Queens” special issue, eds. Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Treva B. Lindsey, and Sonja Drimmer, Scholar and Feminist Online 18, no. 1 (2022). [Link]
  • “Confraternal ‘Collections’: Black and Indigenous Cofradías and the Curation of Religious Life in Colonial Lima,” in Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices, eds. Miguel Valerio and Javiera Jaque Hidalgo (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 117-133. [Link]
  • “From Ira to Imagen: The Virgin of the Antigua as a ‘Space for Correlation’ in Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Colonial Latin American Review 30, no. 2 (2021): 214-237. [Link]
  • “Fashioning Lima’s Virgin of Copacabana: Indigenous Strategies of Negotiation in the Colonial Capital,” in A Companion to Early Modern Lima, ed. Emily Engel (Boston: Brill, 2019), 337-359. [Link]
 
RECORDED TALKS 

Courses Recently Taught

  • ART-HIST 791A  Afro-Latin Art
  • ART-HIST 328/628  Arts of the Americas to 1860
  • ART-HIST 329/629  Latin American and US Latinx Art 1800-Present
  • ART-HIST 391R/691R  Visual Legacies of Colonialism
  • ART-HIST 301/601 Nuestra Señora: Marian Devotion in Latin American Art