COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINAR ON THE ARTS OF AFRICA, OCEANIA, AND THE AMERICAS

Severin Morris Fowles, Barnard College, Columbia University

The Curious Case of Coronado’s Shields: Towards an Iconology of Pueblo Visual Culture on the Eve of Spanish Colonialism

6.30pm Thursday, October 3, 2019 in 832 Schermerhorn

Wine and Cheese 6.00–6.30pm

In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado marched forth to conquer, he hoped, the golden kingdoms that were rumored to exist on the far northern frontier of the Spanish Empire. He encountered instead the Pueblo communities of what is today New Mexico and Arizona. This lecture will reconsider a fleeting episode drawn from the Spanish account of Coronado’s violent travels throughout the region: the gift of shields by a Pueblo delegation to their invaders.

To understand this gift requires a complicated cultural inquiry into not just the meanings of Pueblo shields but the images that adorned them, the wider role of iconography in Ancestral Pueblo society, and the very nature of power, agency, and subjectivity within the indigenous traditions of the American West. Furthermore, the curious case of Coronado’s shields also presents an opportunity to consider what archaeology and anthropology have to offer art history, and vice versa.

MADE POSSIBLE BY A GENEROUS GIFT FROM A MEMBER OF THE SEMINAR

Those wishing to join for dinner with the speaker after the presentation, please email oco2103@columbia.edu to RSVP.

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