Pizza & Prof Speaker Challenges Traditional Perceptions of Art History

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Ximena Gómez will present her Pizza and Prof talk: “Art History Without Art? Identifying Black and Indigenous Artistic Contributions in Colonial Lima,” on November 17th, 2022 at 5 p.m. in the CHC Events Hall East. Gómez is an assistant professor of American Art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. At the event she will share pizza and talk to students about a chapter of her new book, which focuses on the agency of Lima’s Indigenous and Black confraternity members (Catholic institutions that were brought to the Americas by Europeans and embraced and modified by a wide range of colonial subjects). This research work is located in the Peruvian capital during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

Q: What will you be talking about during your presentation to Honors students?

A: I’m going to be sharing some about my research, which focuses on Indigenous and Black confraternities in early Colonial Lima. Ultimately, the argument of the book is that Indigenous and Black people - especially Black people - are the ones we should be crediting as the creators of visual culture in Lima... Confraternities were important organizations in colonial Lima. Almost everybody was part of one, because they're the people who took care of you when you were sick, they're the people who buried you, they're the people who prayed for you after you were gone.

Q: What do you hope Honors students will take away from this?

A: I want students to learn that art history is a different field than it used to be. We have a lot of connotations of being elite, both in terms of who studies it and what we study. And that's definitely not totally inaccurate. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be writing about Italian Renaissance art - I wrote about Botticelli for my undergrad thesis! - but there's increasing diversity in art history. There are people like me who are saying, well, what about the cultural things I grew up with? Does that count as art? And I'm here to say, it does. If you're someone like me - a first-generation immigrant from Latin America - you can also be an art historian. And I'm far from alone in this. My generation of scholars is part of a big shift in art history, and there are really exciting things happening in our field right now, but the word hasn't quite gotten out yet. It's just much broader, it's much more inclusive. It's much more anti-colonial than you'd think.

"Art is something that touches everybody, and I'm using the word art here in the broadest sense, not just the kinds of things that you see on a gallery wall or in a museum. It's visual culture. It's everything." — Ximena Gómez

Q: How did you come to UMass Amherst?

A: I came here straight from my PhD program at the University of Michigan. UMass just happened to be hiring an Americanist at that time, which I was really thrilled about, as a Mount Holyoke College grad. I was pleasantly surprised that the department was excited that I worked on Indigenous and Black art, that I worked on the colonial period and Latin America. In the not-too-distant past, someone with my specialization would not have been eligible for an "Americanist" position, which used to just mean art from the United States. This is a really nice change that we're seeing in the field, more so even now than when I applied for my position four years ago.

Q: Why did you choose to enter the field of art history?

A: Art is something that touches everybody, and I'm using the word art here in the broadest sense, not just the kinds of things that you see on a gallery wall or in a museum. It's visual culture. It's everything. It's the little Peruvian statue of Santa Rosa in my house that counts as art, and looking at that kind of object can tell you about the people that interacted with them…My work is a little bit different from other art historians, who usually look at a body of artworks and then write about them. For my research, I decided I wanted to write about colonized people in Lima, and had to figure out how to write an art history for them, even though their art no longer exists.

"...There's increasing diversity in art history. There are people like me who are saying, well, what about the cultural things I grew up with? Does that count as art? And I'm here to say, it does." — Ximena Gómez