Home / Celebrating a Quarter Century of Latin American Art at Tulane: A Conference in Honor of Elizabeth Boone
April 05, 2024 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM
Uptown Campus
On Friday, April 5th, and Saturday, April 6th, 2024, Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Newcomb Art Department are hosting a conference in honor of Elizabeth Boone. Featuring the work of her students who received their Ph.D. at Tulane, the two-day gathering celebrates Professor Boone's important and enduring legacy in the field of art history.
8:30 am Coffee and light breakfast
9:00 am Welcome
9:30-10:30am Panel 1
Bryan Just, Princeton University, “Space, Time, and Matter in Maya Ceramic Painting”
Catherine Nuckols, Tulane University, “Animate Embodiment in Stone: Maya Full-Figure Glyphs and the Embodiment of Ritual Monument Dedication”
10:30-11:00 am Coffee break
11:00 am-12:00 pm Panel 2
Julia O'Keefe, University of Texas, Austin, “Manifesting the Sacred: Aztec Stone Boxes as Landscapes of Exchange”
William L. Barnes, University of St. Thomas, “Auspicious Days, Monumental Events: Aztec Calendrical Rhetoric”
12:00-1:30 pm Lunch on site (registrants only)
1:30-2:30 pm Panel 3
James Cordova, University of Colorado, Boulder, “Flower Arts in Early Colonial Mexico”
Allison Caplan, Yale University, "They Duck-Talk, They Hum: Embodied Speech and the Human-Animal Divide in Early Colonial Mexico"
2:30-3:00 pm Coffee
3:00-4:00 pm Panel 4
Lucía Abramovich Sánchez, MFA, Boston, “The Predicament of Displaying Colonial Latin American Craft”
Patricia Lagarde, The Walters, “A Worldly Impression: A Replica of the Raimondi Stone at the Middle American Research Institute”
4:00-4:30 pm Discussion
8:30 am Coffee and light breakfast
9:00-10:30 Panel 5
Lori Diel, Texas Christian University, “Witnessing, Beholding, and Critiquing Violence in the Codex Tepetlaoztoc”
Hayley Woodward, Auburn University, “Spatializing Kinship in Mesoamerican Cartographic Histories”
Jennifer Saracino, University of Arizona, “Mapping Nahua Relationships to Land, Water, and Labor in the Uppsala Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan”
10:30-11:00 am Coffee
11:00 am-12:00 pm Panel 6
Emily Floyd, University College London, “Neither Inca nor Savage: Reading Race in Late Colonial Limeño Engraved Portraiture”
Derek Burdette, University of Florida, “Miraculous Imagery and Modern Medicine in Late-Colonial Mexico City”
12:00-12:30 pm Discussion and concluding remarks
12:30 - 2 pm Lunch on site (registrants only)
Lucía Abramovich Sánchez is the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She earned her B.A. from the College of William & Mary and received her M.A. from the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. She holds a Ph.D. from the Latin American Studies & Art History joint doctoral program at Tulane University. At the MFA, she is responsible for a wide range of artwork that includes decorative arts and sculpture from North America and Latin America, spanning over 3,000 years of history. Dr. Abramovich Sánchez previously served as Associate Curator of Latin American Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) in San Antonio, Texas, and has also held curatorial positions at the New Orleans Museum of Art and at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. Outside the MFA Boston, she has curated several permanent installations, including the recently reinterpreted Latin American Popular Art gallery at SAMA. She has served as the presenting curator for the exhibitions Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche and No Ocean Between Us: Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America & the Caribbean, 1945-Present, and organized the exhibition “A Legacy in Clay: The Ceramics of Tonalá, Mexico” among other projects.
William Barnes is an associate professor of art history at University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. He holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Art History and Archaeology from Tulane University, a M.A. in Art History from Tulane University, and a BA in Art History from Arizona State University. His primary area of research is the art of ancient Mexico, with a focus on Central Mexican sculpture and Mesoamerican manuscript painting. His current research focuses on discursive strategies used in Aztec (Tenochca Mexica) imperial art, particularly those that employ aspects of the Mesoamerican calendar.
Derek Burdette is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Florida, where he specializes in the arts of colonial Latin America, with a particular focus on the intersections of art, religion, and colonialism in New Spain. He is especially interested in the history of miraculous imagery in colonial Mexico City. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. He has published articles and essays on the problematic nature of maintaining miraculous imagery, the connection between miraculous statues and printed devotional manuals, the role of artists as expert witnesses and arbiters of miraculous materiality, and the adaptive re-use of colonial architecture within Mexico City’s contemporary art world. His first book, Miraculous Celebrity: The Señor de Ixmiquilpan and Colonial Piety in Mexico City (1545-1845), is forthcoming in the Fall of 2025 with the University of Texas Press.
Allison Caplan is an assistant professor in the History of Art at Yale. Her research centers on Nahua art theory and aesthetics, issues of materiality and value, and the relationship between visual expression and the Nahuatl language. Caplan received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University. Caplan is currently completing her first book, Our Flickering Creations: Concepts of Nahua Precious Art, which reconstructs Nahua theorizations of color, light, surface, and assemblage for art in precious stones, feathers, and metals. Her work has appeared in Ethnohistory, West 86th, MAVCOR Journal, and The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance, and her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty Research Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
James Córdova’s current research examines the exchange of sacred objects and images between Indigenous and Spanish groups in the years leading up to the fall of Aztec Mexico. Additionally, it examines how conquest narratives were negotiated by artists and art patrons in select colonial Mexican religious artworks and public monuments. Another project focuses on the role that Indigenous cosmology and Christianity had in colonial Mexican floral imagery and flower works.
Lori Boornazian Diel is the Kay and Velma Kimbell Chair of Art History at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on Aztec codices created after the Spanish defeat of Tenochtitlan. Her book, The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain (2018), was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Prize in Art and Music History from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. She has also published The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place under Aztec and Spanish Rule (2008) and Aztec Codices: What They Tell Us about Daily Life (2020), as well as essays on Aztec pictorial manuscripts and the role of women in Aztec history. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Emily C. Floyd is Lecturer of Visual Culture and Art before 1700 at University College London and Editor and Curator at the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Culture of Religion at Yale University (MAVCOR). Her current research centers on normative whiteness, implicit depictions of race, and intersecting ideas of sanctity, monstrosity, and the body in colonial South America. Her book on prints made in colonial Lima and their regional and transatlantic movement, The Mobile Image: Prints from Lima in the Andes and Beyond, 1584-1824, is forthcoming in 2025 from University of Texas Press.
Bryan R. Just is the Peter Jay Sharp, Class of 1952, Curator and Lecturer of the Art of the Ancient Americas at the Princeton University Art Museum. Just received a B.A. in Archaeological Studies and the History of Art from Yale University (1995) and an M.A. (1999) in Art History and a Ph.D. (2006) in Art History and Linguistics, both from Tulane University. A specialist ancient Maya art history, his publications include Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vases of the Ik’ Kingdom (2012) and “Printed Pictures of Maya Sculpture” (2012). He served as in-house curator for the exhibition Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait, co-curated by William Fitzhugh and Julie Hollowell, from October 2009 – January 2010 at Princeton. His 2012 exhibition Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vases of the Ik’ Kingdom was one of five finalists for the Association of Art Museum Curators 2012 Outstanding Exhibition in a University Museum. In 2015, he reopened the completely refurbished ancient Americas galleries at the Princeton University Art Museum. Just’s teaching at Princeton includes seminars on Maya and Olmec art, as well as introductory lecture courses on the art of Mesoamerica. Just chairs Princeton University’s Human Remains Oversight Board.
Patricia Lagarde is the Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow - Art of the Americas at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. At the Walters, she is co-curating the first permanent installation of the Arts of the Americas which will open in Spring 2025. She has held curatorial and administrative positions at several museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Lagarde holds a Ph.D. from Tulane University in Art History and Latin American Studies. Her current book project “Facing Pilgrimage: Corporeality, Materiality, and Movement” approaches architectural sculpture at the site of Chavín de Huántar through the phenomenon of pilgrimage and indigenous notions of materiality. The project is drawn from her dissertation, which she defended with distinction in 2022. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and P.E.O. International, among others. As Co-Director of Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica Esculturas Líticas de Chavín de Huántar, Ancash, her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Actas del VII Congreso Nacional de Arqueología, and has authored several essays for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Forthcoming publications include a catalog that will accompany the exhibition at the Walters Art Museum, essays for the Journal of the Walters Art Museum, and an essay in the forthcoming volume for the Denver Art Museum entitled Collecting the “Other” Americas: Ancient Americas Collections in American Art Museums.
Catherine Nuckols is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Catherine’s dissertation focuses on full-figure hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Maya during the eighth century CE, examining how these inscriptions exemplify both linguistic content and visual complexity. By investigating the ways in which art and writing intersect, she hopes to advance understanding of Maya visual culture as it reflects in hieroglyphic writing. Catherine earned her Master of Arts in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and her Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Studies at Brigham Young University.
Julia O’Keefe is the Instructional Services Coordinator at the Harry Ransom Center on the University of Texas campus. Leading a team of early career, graduate student, and undergraduate student instructors, Julia designs and facilitates over 300 classes a year that engage students with primary sources in the Ransom Center’s archival collection. Julia’s own research centers around Aztec material culture, Mesoamerican funerary traditions, antiquarianism in Aztec art and architecture, and the role of objects in ritual performance. Julia’s current project examines Aztec containers as a distinct and specialized category of ritual tools. Focusing on stone boxes (tepetlacalli), funerary urns, and sacrificial vessels (cuauhxicalli), Julia analyzes how iconography, performance, and contents activate the ceremonial potential of containers and shape human and/or deity interaction.
Jennifer R. Saracino is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Arizona. She completed her joint PhD in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Her work has been published in Imago Mundi (co-authored with Barbara Mundy), Artl@s Bulletin, Mapping Nature Across the Americas (University of Chicago, 2021) and Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America (University of Florida, 2023). She is currently in residence at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California as a Barbara Thom Postdoctoral fellow to work on her book manuscript on the Uppsala Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (c. 1540), the earliest known map of Mexico City painted by Indigenous artists after Spanish Conquest.
Hayley B. Woodward is Assistant Professor of Art History at Auburn University. Her research centers on Pre-Columbian and colonial visual communication, placemaking, history-writing, and artistic practices, specifically in sixteenth century Central Mexico. She completed her Ph.D. in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University, and her research has been supported by fellowships at the Getty Research Institute, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and the Newberry Library.