Ximena Gómez
Assistant Professor | American Art
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 colonial Latin America and that of the early modern transatlantic world more broadly.
Research Areas
The focus of her research is on the roles Indigenous and Black people played in artistic and religious expression in colonial Lima, Peru. Her work contends with the absence of Indigenous and Black people in art historical narratives through the use of extensive archival evidence and purposefully centers subaltern epistemologies by considering the visual culture of the Andes and West Africa in analyses of imported European artworks. 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 Latinx art.
Publications
- “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.
- “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.
- “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.
RECORDED TALKS
- Black and Indigenous Artists in Colonial Peru, the Art Gallery of Ontario
- The Virgin of Copacabana in Peru, Bolivia, and Joslyn Art Museum, Joslyn Art Museum
- Creating a New Visual Language: Art in Colonial Peru, the Institute of Hispanic Culture of Houston
Work
She is currently at work on her first book, which examines the visual culture of confraternities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima. In addition to highlighting the agency of Lima’s Indigenous and Black confraternity members, this book will be the first monographic treatment of confraternal art in the viceregal Peruvian capital. 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), and the University of Michigan.
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 397X/697X Nuestra Señora: Marian Devotion in Latin American Art