For the Museum Visit I chose El Cubo, part of CECUT (http://www.cecut.gob.mx/) or Tijuana Cultural Center. Normally the cost for the whole museum goes from 3 to 5 dollars (or even less), but it is completely free if you go on Sunday; so if you guys have the opportunity to go on Sunday take the time to ask at the reception desk about the free passes.
The main exhibition, taking part in the first and second halls, was “Scars of Faith: The Art of the Northern Missions of New Spain, 1600-1821”.
I was particularly drawn to this piece because, just at the end of the exhibition, visitors were shown a video about the restoration of the top part of “Retablo pintado de la Virgen de Guadalupe y sus apariciones” (Painted Retable of the Guadalupe Virgin and her apparitions). According to the team working on the restorations —people from el Antiguo Colegio de San Idelfonso and other participating individual conservators— it is easy to identify the period of the painting just by knowing the color of the base: pure white during the 16 century; red during seventeenth and eighteenth century; and white, along with other variations, is found during the nineteenth century.
The artist appears as Anonymous Novo-Hispanic, and the retable is dated circa 1760. During that time period, portable altarpieces were in high-demand, and most of them were commissioned by Franciscan or Jesuits orders to artist workshops from central New Spain.
The image by itself is presented as an account of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s miraculous apparitions to San Juan Diego: the whole retable is a testimony of faith for both missionaries and converses. This point of view is claimed easier thanks to the life-size of the pictures depicted; which served the purpose of the missionaries (often Franciscans or Jesuits) that traveled the New Spain. Very often this paintings and sculptures were considered miraculous, since they were supposed to protect Christians, and also because they sustained the missions and helped to convert the Amerindians, whom integrated this images into their own worldviews since they included the feminine and masculine forces that governed life, and the use of sacred images was not so foreign to the indigenous population of the northern part of New Spain.
These retables were also meant to bring temporal and spiritual relief to the collective due to the trauma of colonization lived by the northern states of what now is know as Mexico (Chihuahua, Chihuahua in the case of this piece).
I hope that someone decides to pay this exhibition a visit, specially due to its strong religious and historical context.
Good luck on your finals,
Miriam Puente.
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