Two New Shows Cast Light and Darkness on Early Cultures in the Americas (Review/Field Museum in Chicago)
As you reach the close of the ambitious exhibition “The Ancient Americas” at the Field Museum in Chicago, after viewing remarkable pottery displays and large-scale evocations of the great empires of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs, you reach a darkened gallery with a display case labeled “When Worlds Collided.” At its base is a single object: a tilted, disembodied head of an Aztec stone statue.
The room is a memorial to the cultures celebrated in the show and to the many who died in the wake of the European conquest that began in 1492. The text reads, “Millions of indigenous peoples — with an extraordinary diversity of languages, religions and political systems — were wiped out during decades of disease, warfare and enslavement.”
That conquest also has a monumental place in a very different exhibition at the Library of Congress in Washington: “Exploring the Early Americas.” That open-ended show, which spotlights a recent bequest of 3,000 objects donated by the businessman and collector Jay I. Kislak, contains hundreds of early American artifacts, along with rare European books and maps. And at its center are eight late-17th-century paintings from Mexico whose creators are unknown. They are called “The Conquest of Mexico,” and their large canvases portray the epic history of Cortés’s subjugation of the powerful Aztec empire; they teem with armored Spaniards on horseback confronting Aztecs with leopardlike skin.
Read entire article at Edward Rothstein in the NYT
The room is a memorial to the cultures celebrated in the show and to the many who died in the wake of the European conquest that began in 1492. The text reads, “Millions of indigenous peoples — with an extraordinary diversity of languages, religions and political systems — were wiped out during decades of disease, warfare and enslavement.”
That conquest also has a monumental place in a very different exhibition at the Library of Congress in Washington: “Exploring the Early Americas.” That open-ended show, which spotlights a recent bequest of 3,000 objects donated by the businessman and collector Jay I. Kislak, contains hundreds of early American artifacts, along with rare European books and maps. And at its center are eight late-17th-century paintings from Mexico whose creators are unknown. They are called “The Conquest of Mexico,” and their large canvases portray the epic history of Cortés’s subjugation of the powerful Aztec empire; they teem with armored Spaniards on horseback confronting Aztecs with leopardlike skin.