SPAH Seminar Series Week 6: Dr Ximena Gómez

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, Dr Ximena Gómez gives a talk on The Virgin of Copacabana and Indigenous Devotion in the City of Kings

Taking advantage of Lima’s rich documentary record, this talk uses Lima’s Virgin of Copacabana (1588) as a case study for how we might begin to counteract the purposeful erasure of Indigenous people from the art history of the Spanish vicegeral capital. Rather than discuss the Virgin of Copacabana only in terms of its Spanish artists and European influences, this talk shifts the focus of study to the sodality that founded the image’s cult. I place the statue in visual dialog with Chachapoya art, architecture, and cultural practices in order to suggest ways that these confraternity members interrelated with their sacred image. 

About the speaker:
Ximena Gómez is Assistant Professor of American Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A specialist in the art of colonial Peru, her work centers Andean and West African epistemologies in analyses of visually “European” artworks. She is on leave 2021-2022 with a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship to complete her first book.

To attend, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link. The seminar will also be streamed in the Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall Seminar Room.