Reworking the Spanish Colonial Paradigm: Mestizaje and Spirituality in Contemporary New Mexican Art

During the early 1900s, Anglo-Americans in search of an indigenous modernism found inspiration in the Hispano and Native American arts of New Mexico. The elevation of Spanish colonial-style art through associations such as the Anglo-led Spanish Colonial Arts Society (SCAS, 1925) placed Hispano aesthetic production within the realm of tradition, as the product of geographic and cultural isolation rather than innovation. The revival of the SCAS in 1952 and Spanish Market in 1965 helped perpetuate the view of Hispanos either as “traditional” artists who replicate an “authentic” Spanish colonial style, or as “outsider” artists who defy categorization. Thus the Spanish colonial paradigm has endorsed a purist vision of Hispano art and identity that obscures the intercultural encounters shaping contemporary Hispano visual culture. This essay investigates a series of contemporary Hispano artists who challenge the Spanish colonial paradigm as it developed under Anglo patronage, principally through the realm of spiritually based artwork. I explore the satirical art of contemporary santero Luis Tapia; the colonial, baroque, indigenous and pop culture iconographies of painter Ray Martín Abeyta; and the “mixed-tech media” of Marion Martínez's circuit-board retablos. These artists blend Spanish colonial art with pre-Columbian mythology and pop culture, tradition with technology, and local with global imaginaries. In doing so, they present more empowering and expansive visions of Hispano art and identity – as declarations of cultural ownership and adaptation and as oppositional mestizo formations tied historically to wider Latino, Latin American and transnational worlds.