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More than 100 portraits, landscapes, religious paintings, and devotional and secular objects that puts San Antonio's founding in context
List of contents
Foreword, by Katherine C. Luber
Foreword, by María Cristina García Cepeda
Preface, by Diego Prieto
Preface, by Lidia Camacho Camacho
Introduction by Marion Oettinger Jr.
ESSAYS
ONE - Time and Space on the Missionary Frontier:
Cultural Dynamics and the Defense of Northern New Spain by Katherine McAllen
TWO - At Empire’s Edge: Spanish Colonial San Antonio (1718–1821) by Gerald E. Poyo
THREE - Politics, Society, and Art in the Age of Bourbon Reform: Placing the Portrait in Eighteenth-Century New Spain by Ray Hernández-Durán
FOUR - In the Footsteps of Sor María de Jesús and Fray Margil de Jesús: A Guadalupan Atlas by Jaime Cuadriello
FIVE - A Second Golden Age: The Franciscan Mission in Late Colonial Mexico by Cristina Cruz González
Essay Notes
CATALOGUE
People and Places
Cycle of Life
The Church
Catalogue Notes
About the author
Katherine C. Luber was the the Kelso Director of the San Antonio Museum of Art from 2011-2019. She has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Texas, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Between 2005 and 2011, she served as president and CEO of the Seasoned Palate. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College, and an M.B.A. from Johns Hopkins University. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including a 1988 Fulbright Hayes Fellowship in Vienna, Austria. Luber has published and lectured widely on art of the Northern Renaissance.
Summary
Three hundred years ago San Antonio was founded as a strategic outpost of presidios and missions on the edge of northern New Spain, imposing Spanish political and religious principles on this contested, often hostile region. The city’s many Catholic missions bear architectural witness to the time of their founding, but few have walked these sites without wondering who once lived there and what they saw, valued, and thought.
San Antonio 1718 presents a wealth of art that depicts a rich blending of sometimes conflicted cultures -- explorers, colonialists, and indigenous Native Americans -- and places the city’s founding in context. The book is organized into three sections, accompanied by five discussions by internationally recognized scholars with expertise in key aspects of eighteenth-century northern New Spain. The first section, “People and Places,” features art depicting the lives of ordinary people. Such art is rare since most painting and sculpture from this period was made in service to the church, the crown, or wealthy families. They provide compelling insight into how those living in the Spanish Colonies viewed gender, social organization, ethnicity, occupation, dress, home and workplace furnishings, and architecture. Since portraiture was the most popular genre of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Mexican painting, the second section, “Cycle of Life,” includes a selection of individual and family portraits representing people during different stages of life. The third and largest section is devoted to the church.
Throughout the colonial period, Catholic evangelization of New Spain went hand in hand with military, economic, and political expansion. All the major religious orders—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, and the Augustinians—played significant roles in proselytizing indigenous populations of northern New Spain, establishing monasteries and convents to support these efforts.
In San Antonio 1718, more than 100 portraits, landscapes, religious paintings, and devotional and secular objects reveal the visual culture that reflected and supported this region’s evolving world view, signaling how New Spain saw itself, its vast colonial and religious ambitions, in an age prior to the emergence of an independent Mexico and, subsequently, the state of Texas.
Foreword
The show the book is based on "San Antonio 1718: A Tricentennial Exhibition of Art from Viceregal Mexico" will be on exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas from February 16 – May 13, 2018
Promotion in San Antonio and regional Texas
Show could travel in years to come
