Early American history is saturated with imperialism: a reality that stokes discomfort and denial in many contemporary Americans. The art of early America is itself an implicit—and occasionally explicit —testament to the intrinsically imperial nature of the country often celebrated for its ostensible opposition to empire.
From the Andes to the Caribbean, the first major exhibition curated by Horace D. Ballard, the Harvard Art Museum’s Theodore E Stebbins, Jr. Associate Curator of American Art, deftly recenters American art—and American history in general—from its oft-discussed Anglosaxon foundation. Departing from standard depictions of America’s past that tend to focus on supposedly landmark events like English settlements at Jamestown, Virginia, From the Andes to the Caribbean interrogates the Spanish empire’s role in America’s early years. A new picture of early American history emerges out of the radiant Spanish portraiture of the exhibition—a picture bound up with imperialism, not one involving breaking free of imperialism’s yoke.
“It was deeply important for me to reframe the [standard] understanding of American art as not beginning with Jamestown and the pilgrims in 1620 but beginning with the Spanish empire,” said Ballard.
In addition to refocusing the history of American art away from its traditional associations with England, the exhibition also raises questions surrounding power imbalances and philology. Specifically, the exhibition includes things like written descriptions of works in the presumed artists’ native tongues directly alongside translated English descriptions of the works, infusing the exhibition with an aesthetic suggestive of a level of agency balance and equity between the cultures out of which these languages emerged.
“As a teaching museum, and as one of the great collections, encyclopedic collections, not just in the country, but the world, we are beginning to think holistically about what it means to be in service of artists who are with us, and who have preceded us,” said Ballard.
From the Andes to the Caribbean does more than didactically challenge standard Anglophilic conceptions of cultural exchanges between early Americans and their European counterparts. It also aims to rupture cursory geographic binaries, imploring contemporary viewers to consider the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate geographic areas like the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Inclusion and connection are the core of the exhibition, and such inclusiveness involves geographic, racial, ethnic, and religious facets of identity. Consequently, the exhibition is, as a whole, illustrative of the multidimensional nature of identity—both historical forms of identity and contemporary ones. Ballard remarks, for instance, that “by mixing Venezuelan Peruvian, Bolivian, Ecuadorian works together, [the exhibit] help[s] us remember that in our present moment, ethnicity and race often get [conflated,] but they’re very different things … to different peoples across the Americas.”
The color and style of each wall that displays the exhibition’s works are also marked with intentionality.
Indeed, according to Ballard, “the red walls both bring out those beautiful swarths of cochineal in the adornment and self fashioning of these icons and portraits…. It was also deeply important for the section on religion and politics to have red to connote the blood, to connote the pain, to connote the families that were split.” He continued, “hybrid and syncretic identities [are] on white walls. This was the moment when whiteness was becoming a construction. And one of the great gifts of working on this show is to antagonize that construction of white supremacy through a different lens, not just an Anglo American or Anglo colonial lens but through a Spanish lens.”
While doubtlessly emotionally evocative, From the Andes to the Caribbean also demonstrates how the politicalization of religion served as a tool for defending imperialism and exerting social control over American populations. The painting, “Nuestra señora de la merced con los cautivos/Our Lady of Mercy with Captives,” stands out in this vein. Centered in this piece is Our Lady of Mercy, selected as the patron apparition of The Order of Mercy—a group established to free Christians who had been captured in Northern Africa. Though the original purpose of this painting is not certain, Ballard suspects it may have been carried by soldiers who were sent by Spain to rescue enslaved Christians.
“Because of [the painting’s] captive nature it doesn’t seem like it’s a devotional object…. I think that something like this would have been issued in a set of eight or twelve and would have gone to soldiers who were meant to free Christian captives, and I also think this then would have been circulated widely as a print during the times of the early Crusades,” said Ballard. He continued, “In these moments of dreariness, of being in the mud, of being outside in the weather, of being in famine, this image is meant to keep you alive, this image is meant to keep you engaged on the task, this image is meant to deter one’s empathy and consciousness from those who don’t look like you…. I think propaganda is the right word.”
The social constructs of “race” and “whiteness” also take root in the painting as the holy patron saint and her holy family, individuals depicted with white skin. Our Lady extends a hand to the top of one of the native’s heads. He, like the rest of the native people in the painting, is drawn with a darker skin tone, in shackles. In such dark tones, in such shackles, contemporary onlookers are implicitly challenged to consider the individuals with whom Spanish imperialists wanted to associate with righteousness as well as the individuals whom the Spanish viewed to be intrinsically undeserving of freedoms. In its own day, however, the painting is illustrative of division-stoking propaganda, divisions that convinced many Spaniards of the period to see their endeavors in the Americas as courageous acts instead of as crimes against humanity.
“As someone who often spends time with early modern works, it is really important that the work of talking about constructions of race and gender are not just left to modern contemporary works, … in that construction of racial difference and variants also [involves] constructions of free and enslaved bodies,” said Ballard.From the Andes to the Caribbean may leave visitors questioning how their own beliefs about human agency have been shaped by art. Their minds will also likely be inundated with disillusioning thoughts over the influence of Spanish imperialism on the history and legacy of the United States. Just like the United States itself, perhaps we are all not as pristine as we would like to believe.
Adedoyin Adebayo ’26 (aadebayo@college.harvard.edu) and Will Goldsmith ’24 (willgoldsmith@college.harvard.edu) write Arts for the Independent.