Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America is the catalog for the exhibition of the same name that was on display at the Blanton Museum of Art from August 14, 2022, to January 8, 2023, curated by Rosario I. Granados-Salinas. The exhibition featured a diverse group of over seventy objects, including not just paintings but also examples of textiles, clothing, sculptures, prints, and furniture, from throughout Spanish America. The catalog, like the exhibition, successfully uses the popular topic of fashion to present, for a broad audience, a complicated history of colonialism, race, class, and gender in Latin America.
The catalog’s six essays, by emerging and established scholars from the United States, Mexico, and Peru, investigate every aspect of cloth, illustrating its extreme versatility and demonstrating how it intersected with every aspect of colonial Latin American life. The volume is divided into five parts, beginning with “Cloth Making,” which...
University of California Press