Blog Post # 1: Please respond to the following prompt by 5:00 pm on Friday, September 4

My favorite art history projects and culminating papers have been in Professor Houghteling's The Global Baroque and Professor McKee's Landscapes, Art, and Racial Ecologies. I took McKee's course as my writing intensive and wrote a 15 page paper on indigenous Mexican codices, specifically I focused on the Badiannus Manuscript and the Florentine Codex. My paper was about the indigenous creators and artists of these texts that have heavy colonial influence as they are both 16th century and the mainly Nahua individuals who made them were being or had been educated at the Catholic College with mainly Spanish educators. I analyzed the botanical art within these texts and looked for similarities, changes in style and tendencies towards more European post renaissance representations while recognizing Nahua symbols. For my Global Baroque class, I similarly analyzed a colonial text, comparing the Latin description and the fantasticized images of a Brazilian coastal community interacting with European settlers and the fantastic demons that subdued the land. Both of these papers show my interest in codices and colonial texts as well as the role of narrative and dissemination of information and misinformation. The impacts of colonization and the power of who defined and wrote that history still maintain a heavy legacy throughout Latin America, pertaining especially to identity and how the art from this time through until now display how Latin Americans and Latinx people understand ourselves. What is notable about the earlier codices I described is that both were written and then almost immediately lost to time until they were found in Europe where they had presumably been for hundreds of years, detached from their ancestry. Whereas the book about indigenous Brazilians I mentioned is notorious for it being widespread in Europe as many Europeans' first introduction to the new world utilized as a means of proof for why the Americas had to be conquered for their immorality. Prints and textiles are by far my best beloved art forms to study in addition to the codices, and I am hoping to find something that can combine my interests and focus in Mexican and indigenous material culture, archival history, hybridity and the power of narrative.