Q: What got you interested in art history—and in exploring the effects of colonization in the American Southwest and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula through an art history lens?
SOLARI: During my undergraduate degree at U.C. Berkeley, I interned in an archeological lab, spending summers excavating Maya sites in Honduras. I became very interested in how humans manipulate their material worlds, and in cultural contact. I decided to study art history to explore how Christian artworks can be used to reflect on intercultural negotiations between Indigenous populations and the Spaniards in the colonial period.
Q: You study the material composition of paints. Can you explain that research?
SOLARI: I look at the characterization of pigments to understand the longer trajectory of Indigenous traditions. By determining the elemental compositions of paints, I’ve learned that the Maya played the primary role in the processes of painting Christian churches and iconography. Franciscan friars relied heavily on these local artists to paint Christian scenes in the missions they used for evangelism—so the spread of Catholicism was absolutely dependent on Indigenous roots and ancestral traditions. Art making became a form of Indigenous resistance.
Q: How so?
SOLARI:For the Maya, the blue pigment we call “Maya Blue” was sacred. It is not an easy pigment to make, but it doesn’t fade, and you still see it in pre-Colombian Maya sites. In the colonial period, it was used in the Yucatán church murals to color Christ’s Crown of Thorns, for the robes of particular saints, and for the Virgin Mary. In my view, the pigment became an avenue through which the Maya maintained and embedded their ancestral religious beliefs during forced conversion to Catholicism. What we historically conceived of as two conflicting and divergent theologies actually became completely intermeshed.
Q: You won a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue your research in the American Southwest. What will you be studying?
SOLARI: I’ll be asking similar questions of mission wall paintings produced by women Pueblo artists. Working with a collaborative team—including the Tribal Councils of collaborating Pueblos—I will determine the composition of pigments such as ochre and hematite, and then ascertain the mine sites for these raw materials. It’s likely that Indigenous artists were mining sacred landscapes to procure the necessary ingredients to make these pigments.
Amara Solari is a professor of art history and anthropology.
