“Presencing Absence: Visual Cultures of Insurgency in the Andes and the Atlantic World”

This presentation examines artworks implicated in eighteenth-century anticolonial insurgencies in colonial South America that survive only as textual description or in fragmentary form, due to their ephemerality or from having been destroyed, repurposed, or otherwise lost to history. How can we meaningfully incorporate objects that are absent from the art historical record into the canon of early modern art history? Is it possible to engage in art historical inquiry from a space of invisibility and absence? I introduce new possibilities for approaching elisions in the art historical record through the framework of surrogacy. By placing these lost artworks into a broader ecosystem of related images drawn from different geographical and historical contexts, I offer new possibilities for understanding radical creative practices of Andean artists whose work does not survive in its original material form today. In so doing, I consider the implications of this framework for a more hemispheric and inclusive vision of art history.

Ananda Cohen-Aponte is Associate Professor of History of Art at Cornell University who works on the visual culture of colonial Latin America and the early modern Atlantic World. She is author of Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes, published by the University of Texas Press in 2016 and co-editor of Pintura colonial cusqueña: el esplendor del arte en los Andes, published by Haynanka Ediciones in 2015. Her essays appear in a range of journals and edited volumes, including Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas, Allpanchis, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, among others. Her new book project explores the role of the visual arts in fomenting an insurgent imaginary in late 18th-century Peru and Bolivia.