Paul Niell
Paul Niell (PhD, University of New Mexico) specializes in Spanish Colonial art, architecture, and visual culture, c. 1500-1840, and the material culture of the African Diaspora. His current research interests include transatlantic signification and materiality, race and representation, architecture and social mediation, transcultural landscapes, the politics of heritage production, and the reuse of the Greco-Roman classical tradition in the construction of public cultures in the Atlantic world. He teaches courses in the Visual Cultures of the Americas program in the Department of Art History at Florida State University.
On the revival, multiple uses, and multivalence of the Greco-Roman classical tradition in late colonial and early national Latin American contexts, he is co-editor of Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1790-1910 (University of New Mexico Press, 2013). This anthology presents a revisionist view of the neoclassical phenomenon in the art and architecture of this period by examining the discourse of buen gusto (good taste) in societies from New Spain/Mexico and the Caribbean to South America. In these contexts, good taste appears as not only an aesthetic reference, but also a modality of perception and a socio-cultural dynamic of self-creation.
His single-authored book, Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828 was published in 2015 by the University of Texas Press and considers the commemoration of Havana’s foundational site in the late colonial period as a heritage process. According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.
He is currently at work on a new project examining domestic architecture, reform, and society in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico.
Supervisors: Ray Hernandez-Duran
On the revival, multiple uses, and multivalence of the Greco-Roman classical tradition in late colonial and early national Latin American contexts, he is co-editor of Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1790-1910 (University of New Mexico Press, 2013). This anthology presents a revisionist view of the neoclassical phenomenon in the art and architecture of this period by examining the discourse of buen gusto (good taste) in societies from New Spain/Mexico and the Caribbean to South America. In these contexts, good taste appears as not only an aesthetic reference, but also a modality of perception and a socio-cultural dynamic of self-creation.
His single-authored book, Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828 was published in 2015 by the University of Texas Press and considers the commemoration of Havana’s foundational site in the late colonial period as a heritage process. According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.
He is currently at work on a new project examining domestic architecture, reform, and society in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico.
Supervisors: Ray Hernandez-Duran
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This Special Issue acknowledges and draws inspiration from recent scholarship on artists in the Spanish colonial territories throughout the Americas, such as the essay by Barbara Munday and Aaron Hyman, “Out of the Shadow of Vasari: Towards a New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America,” Colonial Latin American Review, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2015): 283-317; the monograph by Susan Verdi-Webster, Lettered Artists and the Language of Empire: Painters and the Profession in Early Colonial Quito (University of Texas Press, 2017); the 2019 Hescah symposium at the University of Florida, “Beyond Biography: Artistic Practice & Personhood in Colonial Latin America,” organized by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi; and the Special Edition of the Colonial Latin American Review, “Visualizing Blackness in Colonial Latin America,” co-edited by Kathryn Santner and Helen Melling, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2021. The study of black artists and image makers in the southern Atlantic has been further advanced by the work of scholars, such as Ximena A. Gómez, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Linda Rodríguez, and Miguel Valerio. These studies shed light on the methodological challenges as well as the importance of considering the lives, careers, and agencies of Spanish colonial artists in the writing of these regions’ social and cultural histories. Among the salient dimensions addressed by these projects is the role of race in shaping the professional lives of artists. For the northern Atlantic, which is situated later in time than those of the Ibero-Americas and the Caribbean and in contexts informed by Protestant conceptions and practices of the image, relationships between the artist, the art, the viewer, and race have been examined in such works as Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke University Press, 2010), Anna O. Marley’s edited collection of essays Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit (University of California Press, 2012), and Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visual Culture in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York University Press, 2015).
Engaging with the subject of black artists in the Atlantic World raises a number of critical questions. How did racial blackness shape the professional worlds negotiated by artists in the Atlantic? How does race impact the ways in which we consider black artists in the Atlantic whose racial classification is not necessarily evident in the formal and stylistic properties of their work? If an artist is of African descent, must their art be a matter of race? What was the relationship between race, blackness, and the creation of the category of “artist” in the Atlantic? What other forms of making and imagery are at stake in this field of inquiry beyond artist and art, as institutionally redefined by academies of art? How has the discourse of race obscured African and African American agency, awareness, and negotiations of imperial/colonial power? How do we address the limits of the historic archive in recovering the stories of such artists? What can be learned by looking across national and imperial boundaries in the Atlantic with respect to the histories of black artists? These questions will be considered and addressed within this Special Issue.
For most of us who reside in the northern hemisphere, the image that first comes to mind at the mention of architecture in Latin America is some type of colonial-style building, that is, one that derives its essential inspiration from Renaissance or Baroque traditions. Such buildings can range from very elaborate creations, like some of the churches in Mexico, to the simplified and austere designs that characterize the mission churches in California and the American southwest. But this image leaves out a large and important corpus of architecture in the Americas whose sources go back directly to the late Middle Ages. The aim of this collection is to provide an introduction to a topic that is virtually unknown, and to identify the circumstances that gave rise to the Gothic style in the colonial period, and subsequently the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century.
The volume opens with a general introduction by the two editors to Late Gothic and Gothic Revival in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries of Latin America. The first three essays, which follow, treat the Late Gothic period, beginning in the early sixteenth century, when waves of European invaders toppled the empires of the Aztec and the Inca, constructed urban centers, and founded religious complexes for the conversion of the indigenous population. In efforts to assert legitimate political authority, to "civilize" according to European culture, and to establish the workings of societies on a frontier, colonial builders looked first to the Late Gothic style of Europe to express power and presence overseas. Early churches, convents, civic buildings, and private houses in the Spanish colonial Americas reveal a lingering taste for things Gothic, one that would persist into the seventeenth century and reveal a multifaceted causation.
After a hiatus of about a century and half, during the course of the first decades the nineteenth century, the Gothic style was revived in parts of Latin America, and by the early twentieth nearly every country in the region had followed suit. The four essays dealing with this more recent development reveal numerous parallelisms between two large but widely separated countries within Spanish-speaking America. In Mexico and Argentina, architects and patrons who desired Gothic forms did not look back to the Late Gothic of the colonial era for inspiration, but to contemporary Europe. As Latin countries gained independence, the new political climate encouraged wider contacts with other parts of the world, and immigration was a key player in this regard. To a large extent, it was the immigrant communities from Britain, France, Germany and Italy that were primarily responsible for introducing Gothic Revival into the Americas. Initially, this was driven both by fashion and a desire to assert national identity, but by the late nineteenth century the Gothic style was readily accepted by Latin Americans as a whole, regardless of whether they were recent arrivals or descendants of the earliest settlers.
refinement becomes not only a mode of production of these commodities for sale, purchase, and use in the Western marketplace, but also in the sense of social consumption and performance through art, architecture, manners, music, dress, and dance. This exhibition plays with these complementary meanings through a juxtaposition of historical artifacts from the Southeastern United States with the contemporary art of Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié (b. 1954, Port-au-
Prince, Haiti). Just as Duval-Carrié’s work comprises the accretion of layers of meaning and material, so, too, does this exhibition bring historical objects into conversation with his works. Through this approach, we dredge up the material and cultural residue of refinement from the colonial period to the present to both locate it within its historical context and bring it into conversation with the complex layers of Duval-Carrié’s work.