Tulane University

Dr. Elizabeth Boone, the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Studies at Tulane University, has been named the Distinguished Scholar for the 107th College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference. Each year, CAA honors a scholar in the field with the Distinguished Scholar Session, one of the highest honors bestowed by the preeminent professional organization in the United States for the visual arts. Previous awardees have included Wu Hung, Kaja Silverman, Richard J. Powell, Robert Farris Thompson, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin, James Cahill, and others.

CAA media and content manager Joelle Te Paske corresponded with Dr. Boone recently to learn her thoughts on art history, scholarship, and challenges in the field. In the interview, Dr. Boone shares with Te Paske what it most exciting in the field today. “Globalism.” Dr. Boone remarks. “The discipline has broken the confines that once centered it in Western Europe and is now focusing on connections between peoples. Centers of discourse are now shifting toward the larger Atlantic world, the Pacific world, the Silk Road, and the trans-Mediterranean/African network, to name just a few. It is opening up new ways of understanding the meaning and agency of art.” To read more, access the entire interview here.

Dr. Boone (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1977) is a specialist in the Pre-columbian and early colonial art of Latin America, with an emphasis on Mexico. Her research interests range from the history of collecting to systems of writing and notation; they are grounded geographically in Aztec Mexico but extend temporally for at least a century after the Spanish invasion. Formerly Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, she has taught art history at Tulane since 1995. In 2006-2008 she was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia. Dr. Boone is also the recipient of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, bestowed by the President of Mexico in recognition for her services to Mexico, and the H. B. Nicholson Award for Excellence in Mesoamerican Studies, awarded by the Harvard University Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Peabody Museum.

Her latest publications include Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007) and Relatos en Rojo y negro: historias pictorales de los aztecos y mixtecos (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), which was awarded the Arvey Prize by the Association for Latin American Art. Written in collaboration with Dr. Gary Urton, Their way of writing: scripts, signs, and pictographies in Pre-Columbian America (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection) broadly considers Amerindian systems of writing. Her most recent book Painted words: Nahua Catholicism, politics, and memory in the Atzaqualco pictorial catechism (Dumbarton Oaks, 2017), written with Louise Burkhart and Davíd Tavárez, deciphers a pictographic catechism from colonial Mexico as a particularly indigenous expression of devotional knowledge. Her current book project focuses on the pictorial encyclopedias of Aztec culture that were created in the decades the Spanish conquest of Mexico.