First Friday: Celebrating All Saints Day

Please join us in the Saints & Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain exhibition for our celebration of All Saints Day!

4:30 PM: Catholic Religious Orders and the Promotion of Saints in New Spain with Gauvin Bailey

The imagery of saints lay at the very foundation of sacred art in Viceregal New Spain and New Mexico. Saints provided an essential tool for religious orders in their campaign of conversion during the so-called golden age of missions to the Amerindians in the sixteenth century and in their efforts to expand their presence in the larger urban centers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits openly competed with one another for the hearts and minds of Christians, each one promoting beatified or canonized members or saints or holy people from outside the order who happened to fit their needs. To use a more contemporary terminology, saints were part of the “brand” of early Modern religious orders.  Religious orders commissioned canvas and panel paintings, murals, sculptures, and retablos depicting saints to adorn their churches, friaries, monasteries, convents, colleges, and residences. In fact, saints’ imagery, along with that of Christ and the Virgin Mary, were the most common subject in the arts of colonial Spanish America. This lecture will consider some of the most popular saints from colonial New Spain and New Mexico, including Saint Rosalia of Palermo, patron protector against the plague, and Catarina de San Juan, a Puebla anchorite who became associated with the folk figure of the “China Poblana” who has served as a symbol of female identity for Mexicans and the Mexican diaspora since the nineteenth century.

Gauvin Alexander Bailey is the Alfred and Isabel Bader Professor in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University, Canada. He has authored over fifteen books on Latin American visual culture, the Italian Renaissance, the global baroque, and the art and architecture of the nineteenth-century French Atlantic. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has held fellowships with the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Villa I Tatti, among others.

5:30 – 6:30 PM We will be joined by Dexter Trujillo singing alabados (religious hymns) in the gallery.

image:  Juan Rodriguez Juárez, Guadalupe with Saints, including Gregorio López, 1720, oil on canvas, 29 5/8 x 22 1/6 in. (75.2 x 56.1 cm). Private Collection. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA, by Peggy Tenison.