At home in the encyclopaedic museum? Viceregal Latin American Art and its disruptive potential

Abstract

This article situates recent focus on Viceregal Latin American art within the broader growth of scholarship and museum activity in the field of Latin American and Latino/a art. The significance of where and how institutions display Viceregal Latin American is explored specifically in the space of the encyclopaedic museum. An account of recent milestones reached by major American civic museums is provided as background for the present critical moment of decision-making facing several of the same institutions. Different sites of display are proposed and considered as productively disruptive of the often-unexamined standards that govern museum practice and, in turn, assert a material pedagogy.

Keywords

• viceregal latin american art
• colonial latin american art
• spanish colonial art
• museum studies
• methodology of display
• charles w. haxthausen
• cuzco