Painted in 1750,Miguel Cabrera’s posthumous portraitofSorJuana Inés de la CruzportraysMexico’s renowned writer,scholar, and muse at her desk, surrounded by her books and other scholarly accoutrements. Createdfifty-five years afterSorJuana abdicatedher life as a scholar,this portrait by renownedNovohispanicartist Cabrera functions, Iargue,as a painted vindication.What pictorial strategies did Cabrera employ in defense of the colonial muse? How do we today and how did the eighteenth-century viewer understand this portrait? Thistalkaddressesthese questions by readingcolonialportraits ofSorJuana in dialogue with analogous depictions of scholars, nuns, and holy women. Literature of the period, most notablySorJuana’s own writings, helpsus unravel both the dangers of intellectual desire as well as its symbolic potential.I then turn to modern and contemporary Mexican and Chicana(Mexican American)portrayals.What canthese contemporarydepictions ofSorJuana reveal about the risks, dangers, and benefits ofbringingtogether art history and Chicanxstudies?Can the tools of Chicanx studies decolonize art history?
Charlene Villaseñor Blackis Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studiesand Central American Studiesat the University of California, Los Angeles, editor ofAztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editor-in-chief ofLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture(LALVC,UC Press). She publishes on a range of topics related to the early modern Iberian world,Chicanx studies,andcontemporary Latinxart. To date, she has won six awards for her editing work, including most recently, two awards recognizingLALVCas outstanding new journal. Her most recent book, with Dr. Mari-TereÁlvarez of the Getty Museum, isRenaissance Futurities: Art, Science, Invention, published in 2019. She recently co-editedthe newChicano Studies Reader(2020);Autobiography Without Apology: The Personal Essay in Latino Studies(2020); andKnowledge for Justice: An Ethnic Studies Reader(2019);in addition toeditingShifraM. Goldman’s final book,Tradition and Transformation: Chicana/o Art from the 1970s to the 1990s(2015).Hermonographon colonial saints, tentatively entitledTransforming Saints: Women, Art, and Conversion in Spain and Mexico, 1521-1800is forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press in early 2022.Her 2006 book,Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empirewon the College Art Association’s MillardMeissaward. In 2016 she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence, bestowedannuallyonone faculty member in recognition of exceptional teaching, innovative research, and strong commitment to university service. She has held grants from the Fulbright, Mellon,Borchard, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, the NEH, the ACLS,and the Getty.Currently, she is PI of“Critical Mission Studies at California’s Crossroads,”a$1.03 million dollar grant from the University of California’sMulticampusResearch Programs and Initiatives;in addition to serving as PI of “Verdant Worlds: Exploration and Sustainability across the Cosmos,” funded through the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative,Art x Science x LA. She will be at Oxford University next year as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art.
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld).
