JANUARY, 2004
Related Events
Comunicado De Prensa en español
Webcast of Symposium

MEXICO’S RICH HISTORY OF INTERRACIAL FAMILIES
REVEALED BY PAINTINGS ON DISPLAY AT LACMA

Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century Mexico
(La invención del mestizaje. La pintura de castas y el siglo XVIII en México)

April 4–August 8, 2004
Presented by Univision Communications Inc.

LOS ANGELES—Richly detailed family portraits that celebrate racial mixing among eighteenth-century Mexico’s native Indian, Spanish, and African populations have been brought together at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the West Coast’s first-ever exhibition of a genre known as casta (caste) paintings. Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century Mexico, on view April 4 through August 8, 2004 and presented by Spanish-language media company Univision Communications Inc., explores the complex process of mestizaje, or racial mixing, that has shaped life in the Americas.

Curated by LACMA’s Ilona Katzew, one of the world's leading authorities on casta painting, the exhibition includes approximately 110 paintings from private and public collections around the world, many on public display for the first time. Included are some of the most accomplished paintings of the genre, such as those signed by the celebrated Miguel Cabrera, the most acclaimed painter of eighteenth-century Mexico, Juan Rodríguez Juárez, José Joaquín Magón, José de Páez, and others. Created as sets of consecutive images, the casta paintings in the exhibition are presented in several complete sets (most have been disassembled over time), which will afford audiences the unique opportunity to see how the images were initially conceived and how the racial combinations were arranged.
 
“These works are wonderful in their artistic detailing and complexity of subject matter. They showcase an extraordinary chapter in Mexico’s history, but at the same time they form part of the larger picture of eighteenth-century Western art,” said Katzew, LACMA curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Bringing them to a city as ethnically diverse as Los Angeles, with its close ties to Mexico, is especially significant.”

The production of casta painting spans the entire eighteenth century. Most sets include sixteen scenes on separate canvases or copper plates illustrating a mother of one race and father of another, with one or two of their children. An accompanying inscription identifies the racial mix of the subjects, such as “From Spanish and Indian, Mestizo” and so forth. In addition to depicting the process of race mixing in colonial Mexico, the paintings also offer rich samplings of local products, flora, and fauna of the New World, providing a unique glimpse into life in Mexico at that time. The works are key visual documents of a social phenomenon that shaped life in the Americas and bear numerous implications today. They also reveal the great artistic achievement attained by colonial artists and present new genres invented in the colonies that had no equivalent in European art.
 
Until now, casta painting has received little exposure, although the works were highly popular and avidly collected at the time of their creation. Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century Mexico charts the development of casta paintings in the eighteenth century, outlining the ways in which their meanings changed according to shifting colonial politics. For example, while early paintings, those from roughly 1700 to 1760, stress the affluence of the colony and embody a collective image of self pride, later works, from about 1760 to 1790, place more emphasis on stratification and the colony’s means of production by depicting a host of trades that closely parallel issues raised by contemporary reformers.
 
By placing casta paintings within their social and historical context, the exhibition shows why the genre was invented, why the subject of interracial families became a topic of a pictorial genre that lasted an entire century, and why the paintings, with their exquisite assortment of objects and detailed renditions, remain as intriguing today as they were in the eighteenth century.

# # #
Credit Line:
This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is presented by Univision Communications Inc.: Univision 34 Los Angeles; Telefutura 46 Los Angeles; and Univision Radio Los Angeles (KSCA-FM, KLVE-FM, KTNQ-AM, KRCD-FM).

It was supported in part by a grant from Bank of America.

Curator:
Ilona Katzew, Modern and Contemporary Art, LACMA

Related Publication:
Katzew’s upcoming book Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale University Press) will be released at the time of the exhibition and sold at LACMA.

LACMA’s Collection of Latin American Art
The Bernard and Edith Lewin Latin American Art Galleries, in LACMA West, occupy 4,000 square feet. The galleries exhibit LACMA’s finest Latin American art as part of its encyclopedic permanent collection and were named after Bernard and Edith Lewin, who in 1997 gave the museum more than 2,000 works, mostly by Mexican modern masters. With the opening of the Latin American Art Galleries, the generous Lewin gift, and continued expansion of the permanent collection in this area, LACMA has become one of the premier repositories for 20th-century Latin American art in the United States.

About LACMA
Established as an independent institution in 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has assembled a permanent collection that includes approximately 100,000 works of art spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present, making it the premier encyclopedic visual arts museum in the western United States. Located in the heart of one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, the museum uses its collection and resources to provide a variety of educational, aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural experiences for the people who live in, work in, and visit Los Angeles. LACMA offers an outstanding schedule of special exhibitions, as well as lectures, classes, family activities, film programs, and world-class musical events.

Museum Hours:
Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday noon–8 pm; Friday noon–9 pm; Saturday and Sunday 11 am–8 pm; closed Wednesdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Call (323) 857-6000, or visit our Web site at www.lacma.org.

General LACMA Admission:
Adults, $9
Seniors (62+) and Students (18+) with ID, $5
Children (17 and under) FREE
*After 5 pm, and the second Tuesday of each month general admission is free to all.
Specially ticketed events and exhibitions require separate admission.