Director’s Foreword

The Denver Art Museum boasts the largest and most comprehensive collection of colonial Latin American art in the United States and since 1968 has presented numerous exhibitions, catalogs, and symposia that have deepened the knowledge and broadened the scholarship in this area. However, no art is made in a vacuum, and styles, techniques, and materials from around the world influence local practices. For instance, our broader collection includes Puebla pottery that imitates Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, Mexican paintings glinting with the iridescence of inlaid nacre that were inspired by Asian lacquerware, and Asian ivories that depict the wounded Saint Sebastian and curly-haired Christ Child.

For centuries, oceans provided the most significant means of transmitting art and ideas around the globe. The establishment of the Manila Galleon trade between New Spain and the Philippines in the sixteenth century provided an annual passage of art and ideas between the Americas and Asia. With objects from China, Japan, and India readily accessible to consumers in the viceroyalties and in Spain, local artists in Manila, Mexico, Lima, and elsewhere began to imitate and incorporate aspects of the new Asian luxury goods into their own practices.

Despite the profound impact of Asia on colonial Latin America, the subject has received relatively less attention than comparable cross-cultural narratives. The Denver Art Museum has pioneered this research and brought it to the fore on numerous occasions as the field has expanded to include the impact of the galleon trade on cultures at both ends of the route. Through the efforts of the Mayer Center for Ancient and Latin American Art, we are delighted to do so once again, bringing together scholars to interrogate this vital moment of cultural crosspollination. In November 2024, scholars from the United States, Mexico, and Singapore converged for two days to examine how the exchanges of materials, techniques, and ideas across the Pacific Ocean impacted the trajectory of art in both Latin America and Asia. The papers here result from the engaging conversations held at the Denver Art Museum in the midst of an early November snowstorm.

I wish to express my gratitude to Karina H. Corrigan, Deputy Chief Curator and the H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and to Jorge Rivas Pérez, former Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum and current Emily Rauh Pulitzer Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum, for their dedication to organizing the 2024 symposium. My thanks also go to Kathryn Santner, Assistant Curator of Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum, who tirelessly led the editorial efforts for these proceedings. And I gratefully acknowledge Jan Mayer, whose ongoing support for the museum and the Mayer Center, along with that of her late husband, Frederick Mayer, has been so crucial to the advancement of the study of the arts of ancient and colonial Latin America.