October 10, 2023
Barbara Mundy, Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History, Tulane University, undertakes some armchair detective work in researching this “deeply familiar and utterly strange” collage in the LWL’s collection. In this latest entry in the Scholars’ Progress blog, Mundy identifies sources for this constructed image consisting of a “cut-out and pasted-down map of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, at center, surrounded by a painting in wash, and the imaginative projection of Aztec peoples, seen in the two figures on the left,” and sees connections in the unsettling imagery with the modern world.