Over the course of nearly a century, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) has amassed a collection of more than three thousand works of Latin American art from the period 1600 to 1900. A small selection of these—about two hundred in number—appear in splendid color photographs on the pages of Appropriation and Invention, a much-expanded update to the museum’s Companion to Spanish Colonial Art, published in 2011. The Companion is relatively narrow in scope, centering on a group of one hundred objects from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries selected by former DAM curator Donna Pierce and organized into six thematic groups, each the focus of a chapter. Those themes, which include “Continuity of Native Traditions,” “Art for Churches and Missions,” and “Hybrid Art Forms,” provided a window onto the state of the research in this field at the turn of the century. Jorge Rivas, Pierce’s successor as curator of...

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