Allure and Endure

We asked curator Diana Cúellar Ledesma, research fellow at the Cisneros Institute, to discuss a quartet of works in MoMA’s collection—and a film that has screened at the Museum several times—that include pre-Columbian images, symbols, and myths. These works embody the influence of the American continent’s Indigenous cultures on modern and contemporary art, and explore the various ways in which artists have interpreted this legacy.

This article is presented as part of the Cisneros Institute’s Bridging the Sacred: Spiritual Streams in Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Art, 1920–1970, an ongoing research project that invites artists and experts from Latin America and the Caribbean to explore modern and contemporary art in relation to spirituality, with a particular focus on Afro-diasporic, Indigenous, occult, Jewish, and Catholic traditions.

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Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky). Statuette of Ixcuina, Mexican Goddess of Maternity. c. 1930. Gelatin silver print

When I began studying Náhuatl a little over a year ago, childhood memories began to wake in my mind. The Nahua and pre-Columbian universe revealed itself to me in forgotten words and customs that had always been with me, even when I lacked the ability to name them. In times of drought or flooding, we Mexicans invoke Tláloc, the Aztec god of rain, making use of cultural practices encompassing ceremonial acts, adages, and jokes. In Cholula, the city where I grew up, the pyramid is the center of communal life. Beyond its importance for the tourist economy, it is the ideal place to take an evening stroll, meet friends, or exercise. During solstices or eclipses, people gather there to practice rituals and recharge their energies.

I am amazed at the way symbols endure and hold the capacity to shape our lives, but I also know that their uses change over time. During the Spanish colonial regime, for example, the legacy of ancient civilizations was not appreciated as it is today, since the Catholic monarchy considered those images to be pagan. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, two modern projects—art and archaeology—played a decisive role in the interpretation, circulation, and reintroduction of pre-Columbian images into daily life.

In the following five artworks, artists from different eras and places made use of the mythic universe of pre-Columbian cultures in order to tackle intimate and social matters such as identity, transcendence, politics, and art itself.

A century has passed since the publication of the first Manifesto of Surrealism, in 1924. Like other artistic avant-gardists, the Surrealists were attracted to non-European cultures, incorporating these objects and religious images into modern art. This is the case with the statuette in Man Ray’s photograph. Its trail goes back to Paris antiquarians; artists and collectors were impressed by its expressive force. We know that André Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, had a replica in his studio, which suggests the possibility that Man Ray knew about it through him.¹ The anthropologist Ernest-Théodore Hamy was the first to identify it as Tlazoltéotl-Ixcuina, the Aztec goddess of lust and maternity,² even though the statuette looks different from its representations in the ancient Aztec codices, where the goddess looks inexpressive and arrayed in a headdress and earflaps.³

Did George Lucas and Steven Spielberg know this photograph? The popularity of the Indiana Jones saga has turned this image into a popular culture icon known as the Golden Idol. Another replica of the statuette appears in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), in which it is erroneously described as a Chachapoya treasure from pre-Columbian Peru. Although several studies have suggested that the statuette photographed by Man Ray could have been created with modern techniques rather than those of ancient Mexico, the curators at Dumbarton Oaks, where it resides, decided to keep it on display not for its authenticity as an archaeological object but for its cultural value as a symbol.

Martine Gutierrez was born in Berkeley, California, in 1989 to a mother from the US and a father from Guatemala. Her art centers on the representation of her multiple identities as a Latinx, transgender, Mayan-descended person. After saying “nobody will put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine,”⁴ Gutierrez created her own magazine, Indigenous Woman, to emphasize the absence of certain bodies and cultures in advertising. Like an antidote containing small doses of the poison it is meant to neutralize, the artist emulates advertising photography and depicts herself in outfits and poses that allude to elegant, powerful Indigenous female figures. The project recalls Interview, the magazine Andy Warhol created in 1969, as well as the work of Cindy Sherman, who made use of self-portraiture to deconstruct the conventions of femininity disseminated in the media.

On this occasion, Gutierrez embodies her own version of Tlazoltéotl with Mayan nuances. Being a mother, the goddess is invoked as a force at once procreative and terrifying, lustful and filth-devouring. For Gutierrez, mythologies maintain their lives through images, which operate powerfully on the human psyche. This work testifies to the intense interest in myth and the divine that still endures in contemporary art.

Martine Gutierrez. Demons, Tlazoteotl ‘Eater of Filth,’ p92 from Indigenous Woman. 2018. Chromogenic print

Leandro Katz. El Castillo [Chichén Itzá]. 1985. Gelatin silver print

One of the world’s top tourist attractions, Chichén Itzá was a major Mayan city. It was most likely a Tollan, a mythical city of great spiritual importance. The pyramid known as El Castillo (the Castle) was originally a temple dedicated to Kukulkán, a culture hero and solar deity analogous to the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl, who was also related to wind and water.

Over the past decades, artist, poet, and translator Leandro Katz has made work informed by a profound fascination with the Mayan world, particularly its writing, architectonic systems, and the way it has been represented throughout history. For his Proyecto Catherwood, Katz traveled through the ruins in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, following the journey of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, the first English-speaking explorers to enter Mayan territory. Catherwood made engravings of that expedition, with the help of a camera lucida, which were published as a travel notebook in 1841 and had a great impact on the dissemination of a romanticized image of the Mayan world in Europe and the United States.

Katz photographed the emblematic monuments from the same angles that Catherwood used in his engravings. In several of his photographs, he includes the engravings, shown held in his hand. According to the artist, this gesture not only seeks to compare the state of the ruins with the nature surrounding them, but also to emphasize that there are no innocent images: every representation is a manipulation of reality.⁵

Jorge Eielson. White Quipus. 1964. Fabric and tempera on canvas

Although the knotted cords called quipus were not originally linked to religion, being used for counting and presumably writing by the ancient Incas, in Jorge Eielson’s art they function as elements of ascension through the senses. In the 1960s, this Peruvian poet and artist began to incorporate the colored knots into his paintings as evocations of a distant cultural past that he endowed with mysticism and enigma.

Eileson was born in Lima in 1924, but at an early age left to settle in Europe, where he lived until his death. Much of his interest in Peru’s Indigenous peoples was due to the influence of his mentor, the indigenist writer José María Arguedas. But the decisive experience behind his adoption of the quipu’s knots as a central element of his artistic vocabulary was migration.

Eielson’s profound relationship with language guided this fascination with a writing system that was radically different from the Western one: quipus’ appearance and material have a crucial narrative function. As part of his spiritual search, Eielson dabbled in practices like Zen Buddhism and became interested in the Spanish mystics, but above all else he believed art and poetry to be paths toward transcendence and healing.⁶

La Llorona. 2019. Guatemala. Directed by Jayro Bustamante

The legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) is the only tale in the popular oral tradition that extends from the north to the south of the American continent. Rooted most deeply in Mexico and Guatemala, it tells the story of the tormented spirit of a woman bewailing the death of her children. She appears near rivers and lagoons and is usually associated with the female divinities of water.

It should not be surprising that the film director Jayro Bustamante chose this legend to take on the painful subject of the Mayan genocide that occurred during his country’s civil war between 1960 and 1996. Bustamante, who was born in Guatemala in 1977, has said that his generation grew up with the fear of war, so the horror genre is a plausible way of addressing this dark period, which is still a taboo subject in Guatemalan society.⁷

In the film, the Weeping Woman appears as a Mayan who comes to work as a servant in the home of a retired general who is confronting a judgment against him for crimes committed during the armed conflict in Guatemala. While most of the story takes place amid the intimacy of domestic spaces, where the young woman’s presence begins to create disturbing situations for the man and his family, the uneasy atmosphere conveys the country’s political tension. When I saw this film, I was impressed by the trial sequence, in which Mayan women present their testimonies. I felt like I was experiencing a historical lament for destroyed lives.