Installation | A Voyage to South America
Unidentified artist, active in Cuzco, Peru, Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá with Female Donor, late 17th/early 18th century (Carl and Marilynn Thoma Collection)
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From the AIC:
A Voyage to South America: Andean Art in the Spanish Empire
Art Institute of Chicago, 11 November 2014 — 21 February 2016
While the Art Institute has a long tradition of collecting and displaying works from the pre-Hispanic cultures of South America, this long-term installation offers the museum’s first presentation of work from the viceregal period. Fourteen paintings and related works on paper—including pieces from the collection of Chicagoans Marilynn and Carl Thoma never before displayed in a museum, as well as important loans from the Newberry Library and Denver Art Museum—introduce visitors to explorers, artists, and patrons who lived in the Spanish-governed Andes during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Unidentified artist, active in Spain, Portrait of Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiral, 1768–70
(Carl and Marilynn Thoma Collection)
The metaphorical guide of this journey is Antonio de Ulloa (1716–95), a Spanish naval officer and cartographer who traveled to South America with a French scientific mission in the 1730s and 1740s. His portrait introduces the group of works assembled—paintings of identified sitters, signal works by important South American artists, and devotional paintings that include historical figures. Each work has its own direct link to individual biography and lived experience in the New World, offering a more personal look at the themes of exploration and discovery and bringing to life the culture and artistic production in South America as European conventions combined with indigenous traditions.
The installation is accompanied by a bilingual brochure as well as bilingual treatment of all object labels, wall texts, and audio guide stops. Select works have also been added to the museum’s ‘Closer’ app, featuring slide shows, videos, archival materials, and more for further insight into this unique period of cultural convergence.
At noon on 17 February 2015, Victoria Sancho Lobis, associate curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings, will discuss the exhibition.
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Chicago’s Newberry Library will host a symposium on Latin America in the Early Colonial Period on Saturday, 11 April 2015, exploring related material in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Rebecca Long Appointed Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago
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From the press release (9 January 2015) . . .
The Art Institute of Chicago announces the appointment of Rebecca Long as the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Associate Curator in the Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture. She will be responsible for Italian and Spanish painting and sculpture before 1750.
A specialist in the art of 16th- and 17th-century Spain and Italy, Long is currently Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1800 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. There she spearheaded work on the forthcoming catalogue of the museum’s Clowes Collection, offering the first scholarly and technical analysis of that important collection of masterworks of the Italian, Spanish, Netherlandish and German schools. She will assume her Art Institute duties on February 27, 2015.
“We are delighted to welcome Rebecca to the Art Institute,” said Sylvain Bellenger, Searle Chair and Curator, Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture. “She is not just a scholar; she enjoys sharing her knowledge and passion to reveal the freshness in a work of art and to enlighten our diverse audiences, one of the museum’s key missions. Every Old Master was once a contemporary artist. Rebecca approaches the art of the Italian Renaissance with the aim of awakening for us the energy and immediacy the works held for the patrons and creators of their time.”
Long will be receiving her Ph.D. from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in early 2015, with a dissertation on Bartolomé Carducho and the role of Italian artists in the Spanish court during the Renaissance. She received her M.A. in art history and archaeology from New York University and her B.A. (magna cum laude), in the history of art and architecture as well as business administration, from the University of Pittsburgh. She has been awarded multiple prestigious fellowships, including those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Villa La Pietra in Florence, and, most recently, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti, also in Florence. Long has actively presented her research at such venues as the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts and the annual conferences of the College Art Association, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Sixteenth Century Society. Forthcoming publications include the Catalogue of the Clowes Collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and essays in After Trent: Rethinking Art around 1600 and Sobre Vicente Carducho: Diálogos de la Pintura.
“I am thrilled to be joining the Art Institute,” said Long. “For a curator, the opportunity to work in a museum environment that combines a strong commitment to scholarship with an equal commitment to engaging visitors is a dream come true. I look forward to getting to work.”
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