What Defines Latin American Art?

[00:00:00] [Music by Conjunto Bruja plays]

[00:00:37] Karena Ingram, host: Bienvenidos a Free Admission, the Walters Art Museum podcast where we bring art and people of every background together to inspire creativity, curiosity, and connection. I’m your host, Karena Ingram, and the clip you just heard was from a special performance with the all-woman ensemble, Conjunto Bruja, held last year in our Graham Auditorium.

I hope the tunes already have you grooving and moving because today’s episode celebrates the debut of Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano, a new permanent installation at the Walters, showcasing the museum’s expansive collection of art from South, Central, North America, and the Caribbean.

First, we’ll chat with the curators, Ellen Hoobler and Patricia Lagarde about this installation, and answer today’s question, “what defines Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano?”. Then we’ll hear from artist Jessy DeSantis about the creation of their work, Cintli, Corn, Maíz, featured in the installation.

No tickets necessary. Free Admissions starts now.

[00:01:37] The North Court galleries of the Walters Art Museum are looking quite different now than they did one year ago. Located just off the museum’s iconic Sculpture Court, these spaces have undergone their first major renovation in 40 years. The walls have been freshly painted, the beauty of the original terrazzo flooring has been revealed, and some 200 Latin American art objects have been carefully placed in custom design cases for a brand new installation.

Now on view, Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano is the first long-term installation dedicated to this area of the museum’s permanent collection. It allows visitors to experience art that traverses 4,000 years and showcases the artistic output of 40 cultures from North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean.

The objects on view in Latin American Art have been drawn from the Walters’ permanent collection and are accompanied by a handful of loans and newly acquired contemporary works. What links these pieces together? While specific beliefs and expressions differ across Latin American cultures, which span for millennia and thousands of miles, among them, there is a broadly shared understanding that human, plant, animal, and mineral entities are all intertwined with a single life force.

The majority of the installation’s artworks are made from or inspired by materials that are found in the natural world, including copper, clay, feathers, gold, jade, shells, stones, wood, and wool. These materials were considered by their indigenous makers to be animated by a life force that unites communities and their artistic practices across time and space.

The art featured in Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano is arranged by both theme and geographic origin. Objects from the Andes, Mesoamerica, Central America and the Caribbean are grouped together, while thematic cases explore various material, uses connections between cultures and the land on which they live, the colonial period, rituals, ancestors, food, and drink, glyphic text, and more. Objects included in the installation demonstrate manifestations of the belief in an interconnected spirit, including textile pieces that reflect motifs from the natural world, ceramic effigy vessels shaped to look like animals, and gold and jade figural pendants.

For the first time at the Walters, some of the written materials in the installation are presented in both English and Spanish. In addition, interactive gallery elements reinforce the installation’s content. New reading nooks encourage children and young adults to dive further into Latin American culture through myths and stories. A scent station in the MesoAmerican galleries allows visitors to get a whiff of copal resin, a natural substance important to the ancient Maya. Visitors can get a feel for ancient glyph text at a touch station and video stations throughout the installation allow visitors to explore several living Latin American traditions in depth, learning from the community members who are preserving these traditions.

The community members who shared their expertise for these videos are also linked to the installation in another way: through that singular life force, which threads altogether the elements of Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano that shared living spirit encompasses more than just the art on view. It also expands out to join the artists, past and present, who created these artworks and the visitors who come to see those works. Creating a continuum that links people, plants, animals, and minerals and artworks together across space and time.

[00:05:00] To talk more about Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano, I’m thrilled to be talking with the curators of this installation, Ellen Hoobler and Patricia Lagarde.

Ellen and Patricia, welcome to the podcast.

[00:05:11] Ellen & Patricia: Thank you.

[00:05:12] Karena Ingram, host: Yeah, of course. Before we dive into Latin American Art and all of the wonderful things that people will now be able to see, since—if you’re hearing this now, the installation is open, it opened on May 17th. But to put a voice to name, if you could just introduce yourself and let us know your title and how long you’ve been at the Walters.

[00:05:31] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: I’ll go first, alphabetically. Ellen Hoobler. I am the William B. Ziff Jr. Curator of Art of the Americas here at the Walters, and I’ve been here since 2017.

[00:05:32] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Hi, my name is Patricia Lagarde. I am the Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow for the Art of the Americas, and I have been at the Walters for just about two years now.

[00:05:52] Karena Ingram, host: Now we’re recording this interview right now before the opening of Latin American Art. Then, listeners would’ve just heard like a brief overview about this installation.

But if you could both expand more on the process of curating Latin American Art and give kind of a brief timeline for our listeners, starting with early stages to where we are now.

[00:06:12] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Yeah, so as I mentioned, I joined the Walters in 2017 and really this has been a process that’s been ongoing since that time.

I mean, you could look at an even broader time depth, which is that the Walters acquired the first work of what we now would call maybe pre-Columbian or ancient American art in 1897. We have this great record of Henry Walters buying what was called a Peruvian Chalice from Tiffany and Company in New York.

So, that silver work you’ll be able to see on view in the Andes galleries that Patricia has curated. But curiously enough, it seems as though the ancient American art was shown in some drawers up on the second floor when the museum opens as a public institution in 1934. We had some different gifts, particularly one from John Gilbert Bourne in 2009, and since that time we’ve been moving towards having permanent galleries.

I joined in 2017. I’m a specialist on Art of Mesoamerica, which is sort of Mexico and Northern Central America. But I didn’t realize I was just waiting for a partner in crime to come and join me. So things really have moved more quickly in the past few years. I don’t know if you wanna talk to that.

[00:07:28] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Sure.

So I joined the Walters two years ago, specifically to work on this installation. Ellen, of course, as she just mentioned, is a specialist in Mesoamerica, which is Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, that general region, sometimes referred to as Middle America. My expertise is actually in the art of the Andes.

Ellen was looking for a partner to work on the exhibition with her that had a different area of specialties. And so the two of us together could bring a broad spectrum of knowledge to the installation.

[00:08:02] Karena Ingram, host: And this installation has a large coverage comprised of 40 different cultures, around 200 objects.

And to think that some of these objects were in a drawer on the second floor, and now this installation takes up our entire North Court galleries, which haven’t been renovated in over 40 years. When it came to narrowing down a checklist and picking which objects you wanted reflected in this installation, how did you go about making those decisions?

Especially when you’re covering so many different cultures and regions?

[00:08:33] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Yeah, I mean, I do wanna just point out that the Walters, like so many other museums, we have a really broad collection. I believe we’re up to 36,000 objects total, and even in the ancient Americas, there’s around 800, 850 works in the collection, in our departmental collection, and so we did have to really do a process of winnowing things down.

[00:08:55] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Sure. I mean, one of the first things that Ellen and I did when I joined the team was to just go into storage. As Ellen mentioned, you know, only a percentage of our collection is out on view at the moment, so we had to look through the collection and find where our strengths were.

And from these strengths, we were able to come up with a variety of themes such as the land or community or ancestors or rule ship. And then of course we, you know, are constantly thinking about how to rotate the objects in the collection. Several of the objects are light sensitive, such as textiles and books. So we had to think about rotations and where the strengths were to start and where we wanted to take those rotations in the future.

[00:09:36] Karena Ingram, host: Mm-hmm. And this installation is kind of segmented to follow those themes, and when visitors progress through, they’ll be able to see different cultural representations, the materials that you’ve mentioned before.

Can you speak to how the influences of those different cultures came down to the exhibition design and how you wanted to lay out these themes for visitors to see?

[00:09:56] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Of course. So the three major rooms in the exhibition are organized around geography. So there’s a room dedicated to the Andes, which is the part of South America along the Andean mountain chain.

There’s also a section on Mesoamerica, which is Ellen’s specialty, and then we have the central room, which is the Caribbean and Central America. But then we also have several themes that we’re trying to pull as threads throughout the installation as well.

[00:10:23] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Yeah, so there is one section that’s called the Long Lives of Objects to kind of gesture towards the ways that objects may be created in one time in place and have one meaning, but over time, they may take on new meanings, completely different from their original meaning.

But also, I think the overarching theme that just cuts across the whole exhibition really has to do with materiality and the importance of materials in this region. That materials had deeper meanings than simply. “Oh, I’m looking for something green. Let me use, you know, an emerald or something jadeite.” That there are these really deep cultural meanings that are associated with objects.

We probably will say, mention this phrase about five times during this podcast, but Latinos and the Latin American community is not a monolith, and we are talking about places that include some of the driest deserts in the world in the Andes, extremely high mountains. Also lowlands, and tropical forests, and cornfields, and caves, and oceans, and rivers. So it’s a really broad range geographically and also culturally.

So we try to gesture towards that. In the Andes room for example, there are these trapezoidal shapes that gesture towards the architecture. In the Mesoamerica room, the paint treatment is more of like a step pyramid that gestures towards the fact that people were making step pyramids in that area. And in the Central America and Caribbean, it’s more of a river treatment. But we tried to just find ways to gesture towards Latin American and Latino identity throughout. Even the font that is used for the title wall and for the main graphic identity is one called Ancho by Beatriz Lozano, a Mexican-American designer. And so I think that graphic identity comes through, maybe even with also the wallpaper.

[00:12:16] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: You know, the materials have been a really core element to the installation. The first room as you enter into the exhibition is going to be a specific focus on these indigenous notions of materiality. We focus on stone and shell, feathers, gold and cinnabar, as well as this beautiful Maya Blue, and we do try to kind of thread these through the installation, through all the different rooms, so we’re hoping that by entering into this material room, you are inverting your own understanding of these materials and that you can bring this to the different gallery spaces as you walk through the exhibition.

And then Ellen, you were asking about the design accents? Of course, we’ve been influenced so much by all the different community voices in Baltimore as well as. The diverse civilizations and diverse cultures that we are representing in these galleries, and we’ve brought this in in wallpaper treatments. There’s a reading corner across the way from a case on glyphic text and glyphic writing. The wallpaper treatment on that is a reference to Aztec writing, which was called Pictographs.

So I personally think that we should be selling this in the shop and think, I would love to buy some absolutely peel and stick for my house. Mm-hmm. But yeah, there’s a lot of, a lot of design accents that are referencing these cultures as well.

[00:13:32] Karena Ingram, host: Mm-hmm. That’s personally one of my favorite aspects when walking through the installation, is that there’s really an attention to having this vast representation of all of these different cultures, and there’s an attention to detail that I can’t wait for visitors to see. I think that people, especially of the Latine community, will be very appreciative to see this representation. I think it’ll be very meaningful, and so it’s very exciting to hear all of these different sources that you’re pulling these design aspects from, all the different things that you’re thinking about when approaching this installation and so,

[00:14:07] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Absolutely yeah. Even down to the colors. So the Andes Gallery is a purple, the Caribbean and Central America is a blue, and Mesoamerica is a green, which the green is a great reference to the lush tropical forest of a lot of Mesoamerica.

[00:14:20] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: And to the jade that was there.

[00:14:20] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Mm-hmm. And to the jade. And of course Central America and the Caribbean is surrounded by so much water, and so the blue is really kind of a reference to that very watery landscape. And then in the Andes, the purple is this beautiful, rich kind of reddish purple that is a reference to actually the potatoes that were domesticated and grown in that region, which are far more than our Idaho spud potato that you think of. But there are these, so many different varieties and so many different colors, and I thought it would be really great to highlight the rich purpleness and earthiness of those crops.

[00:14:53] Karena Ingram, host: Mm-hmm. Once you all that are listening, come out and visit this installation, you’ll be able to see all of these wonderful details.

There’s gotta be an incredible amount of research that is dedicated to preparing this installation. We do have the catalog, The Spirit Within, which is now on sale in our store, if you wanna grab yourself a copy. Is there anything that you came across that was surprising to you when preparing for this installation?

[00:15:14] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Oh my gosh. I feel like we made so many different discoveries, frankly. Also, I feel like we’ve tried to further research that assists scholars not only in the United States, but across Latin America. During the process of preparing for this, you know, we welcomed a team from Panama who are working at the El Kano archeological site and who were really interested in understanding more about emeralds.

We have been working a little bit with the town of Juaquitula in Puebla in Mexico. Research from this project has also added to a much broader project on this cinnabar, this red mercury pigment that Michelle Young is doing. So we have tried to add to other people’s research.

And one thing that’s kind of coming up right now is that—this is still not concluded, but we have been doing research into the gold that Henry Walters collected because we actually have a specific location within Panama that we know that a lot of this came from. And so it’s kind of an unusual opportunity to really look at a whole trove that’s coming from one cemetery and understand are those the same mixtures of gold, these alloys of gold, or are they different?

So are these things coming from the local region or are they coming from much further afield? Maybe from as far as Columbia or further north in Costa Rica. We have an amazing conservation scientist, Annette Ortiz, and Angie Elliott—and she has a very long title—but she’s the head of conservation right now, and they’ve been working on that.

But just as a specific, very concrete discovery, we have this one wood mask that I’ve been really interested in and it has some red spots on it, which I just had always assumed were this red cinnabar pigment. And we were getting ready to write about this. This was gonna be the anchor object for minerals, ’cause yeah, this is definitely the cine bar Mercury. Come to find out it’s not. It’s an organic pigment, so it probably is cochineal made from crushed insects. In fact, it is definitely not cinnabar.

I don’t know. What about you, Patricia? What do you think?

[00:17:12] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: I mean, there’s been two, two avenues that have surprised me a little bit.

One is we have a small case dedicated to the colonial world, and we’re including a book and a silver stirrup as well as a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe in this case. And of course the Virgin of Guadalupe is, you know, a female representation. But what surprised us, I think a little bit, was that the stirrup.

Ellen was a little confused at why there was only one at first, and then as we started digging into this, it actually turns out that it’s a ladies stirrup for a side saddle, so you will only see one. And then the book that we’re including in the case as our Curator of Rare Books, Lynley, she was pulling books and looking for contributions women had made in these books. And recently came to the conclusion that the book that we’re including was colored and printed by a female printer. So the whole case actually has ended up being dedicated to two women unintentionally, but very serendipitously, I think.

And then another surprise, Ellen and I took a field trip down to Peru last year. And we were exploring down the south coast of Peru, going through the museums, looking at different objects that related to objects in our collection, and we stopped into this ceramic workshop where an individual was making ceramic replicas for people to purchase.

[00:18:35] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: And you know, he’s signing them like it’s very clearly replicas.

[00:18:37] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: It’s very much, you know, art to be purchased by individuals as replicas. And he’s giving this demonstration and showing how he makes it in the same tradition as individuals of his heritage. And behind him on the wall, he has printouts of these beautiful ceramic vases and vessels that just so happened to be objects in the Walters collection.

[00:19:00] Karena Ingram, host: Oh wow!

[00:19:00] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: We were looking at him and then we’re like, “Wow, that looks really familiar.” And then we’re like. “Oh no, it is very familiar. It’s extremely familiar.”

[00:19:07] Karena Ingram, host: That’s incredible. Are they objects that are on view in the installation?

[00:19:11] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Yes.

[00:19:11] Karena Ingram, host: Oh, that’s incredible. You’re bridging connections in real time.

[00:19:15] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: And I think this goes to the Walters having their objects in the public domain.

[00:19:19] Karena Ingram, host: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:20] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: That they’re being used across the web in very different, various, different aspects that when individuals are looking for representations of say, Nazca pottery, the Walters objects are some of the first that come up.

[00:19:32] Karena Ingram, host: Yeah, that’s incredible knowing that like our historic collection is inspiring artists today, artists that aren’t local here, mind you, either it makes me think about the contemporary artists that are featured in Latin American Art as well, and how they, too, are bridging these connections from past to present. Could you talk about the contemporary works that are going to be featured in this installation and working with those artists?

[00:19:57] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Well, so this is a great bridge actually from the last question you asked because one of the artists that we’re featuring is Kukuli Velarde. She’s a Peruvian ceramicist and painter who currently lives in Philadelphia, but she also has taught at MICA as a professor, so she has a great Baltimore connection as well. We’ll be featuring a work of hers at the very beginning of the installation.

But to go backwards a little bit, when Kukuli came to the Walters for the first time, we brought her behind the scenes, into storage, into the conservation studio, and she was beyond overjoyed because she saw objects in our collection that she had been using as inspiration in her own work for so long.

And there are several of these, actually, in our collection, many of which will be on display, that if you look at her work, her body of work and the objects that she’s produced, which reference the ancient past of Peru, many of them are in reference to our antiquities that we have.

The Kukuli piece that will be on display is actually kind of the grand opening to the exhibition. It is a stacked five-piece ceramic that is called Waka Del Agua, and “waka” is a quechua word meaning “sacred entity.” It’s a kind of this divine essence and sacred entity. And what I love about this piece is that it not only marks the galleries as the sacred space and the space of, you know, mutual care and respect.

But also the piece speaks to the history and the long history in Latin America. So the bottom piece is a reference to the Wari Empire, which is the empire that preceded the Inca. The second piece is a reference to the Inca Empire. The middle piece is a reference to that colonial period, and then the piece above it has paintings of her mother and her daughter and is speaking to kind of the post independence era. And then the top piece is a reference to the contemporary present. So it also is kind of spanning all these different time periods that our galleries are, you know, addressing.

[00:22:07] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Yeah, we definitely have tended to include works that gesture towards the ancient past in many different ways.

There’s a work that will be here for at least the first two years of the installation, which is by Edgar Reyes, a Baltimore-based artist who is Chicano. And in fact, it includes this vessel from the Zapotec culture of Southern Mexico. And he was actually thinking of one in our collection, even though I think the imagery is actually one that’s in the Museo Nacional in Mexico City.

But he was really thinking about our collection, and I would say that one thing that people may not realize is that we—Baltimore is a city of artists and we are really open. Edgar has come to storage and come and look at things. Rene Trevino, another artist who’s represented by a loan—a fantastic, huge figure in the Sculpture Court.

He has come in to look at objects in storage and really understand the ways of making of some of these things. We have a video that deals with the artist and musician and ceramicist, Melissa Foss, who’s been creating replicas of some of these. So there’s sort of many different ways that these objects, these contemporary works reference the ancient works in the collection as well.

And I love that we are really open. Whether that is something where somebody’s on the other side of the planet and it’s 2:00 AM but they’re able to access many different images. That’s what’s so great about the ancient American images on our website, is that we have multiple views, and that I think is why we’ve become sort of so popular among, you know, artists, craftspeople, people who are just interested in understanding their heritage more broadly.

[00:23:44] Karena Ingram, host: Yeah. Incredible reference points we have on our art site. And you mentioning the videos and even the tactile interactives. It makes me think of like other ways that people can engage with this installation outside of the art itself.

And I don’t know if you wanna speak to any other interactives. There’s a scent station, I will spoil. Any other interactives that you have to enhance a visitor’s experience in this installation?

[00:24:08] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Sure. Well, Ellen was just talking about the replicas that Melissa Foss makes. There’ll be several videos in the galleries that bring the culture of Latin America to life.

People that are engaging with the objects of ancient past and using them in their own practices today, whether that is in cooking, in culinary, or dance or in music. And so Melissa Foss, who Ellen referenced earlier, is a visual artist, but also a sound artist. And she makes the replicas of many of these objects.

But she’s also been making her own objects recently, and there’ll be a video of her playing some of these instruments that she makes out of ceramics. It’s a really beautiful thing because we, you know, even as curators are not able to fill some of these vessels with water and see the sounds that they make, of course we have to be concerned about object conservation.

But with the replicas…

[00:25:02] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: And they’re like 1200 years old.

[00:25:03] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Yes, of course. No matter how much we want to. But with the replicas that Melissa makes, and she’s using x-rays and things of the objects to really understand the internal dynamics, she’s able to really bring them to life. And I think it’s gonna be a really beautiful pairing that you can listen to some of these replicas of these vessels next to a case where you can see the original object.

[00:25:24] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Certainly, materiality and meanings of materials is one of the themes, but if there’s a second theme that intertwines with that, I would say that it is how these are enduring, living cultures. And that comes out through the videos, and that comes out through the scent interactive you mentioned, where you’ll be able to pick up something that looks like a little phone receiver and smell that, and you will be able to smell the copal incense that is still used until the present day in Mesoamerica.

So many different celebrations and important occasions from funerals to weddings to Day of the Dead cannot be celebrated without hot chocolate—which we unfortunately cannot offer to every visitor—and special bread. But also those things are celebrated with clouds of copal smoke, and so we wanted to give people at least to just a touch of these multi-sensory experiences that these objects would’ve been a part of in the past.

As well as when we think about drinking that chocolate, we think about the drinking vessels that it was poured from or poured into. And we have one that’s particularly terrific, that’s a Guatemalan—probably would’ve been a serving vessel. It’s very large, otherwise you’re drinking about a gallon of hot chocolate on your own. So I, it looks like it’s a serving vessel. And in size on the side of it are these glyphs, which are just lightly kind of carved into the side. And so we 3D printed one of those glyphs, the glyph for “cacao” or “chocolate,” and allow visitors to kind of be able to rub their hands over that to think about how people would’ve felt that every time that they’re moving this vessel around.

[00:27:05] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: And I would also add, we’re also including children’s books in the different galleries that are more accessible ways of kind of digesting this information for some of our younger viewers. And I do think that this speaks a little bit to this idea of the living traditions because even though they’re being practiced and kind of used today, the books are, you know, a nod to kind of the next generation and kind of passing down these cultures and passing down this heritage as well.

[00:27:32] Karena Ingram, host: Mm-hmm. And I’m glad that we’re talking about live tradition and representing those in all senses, and knowing that you both had the opportunity to work with a community advisory group closely and to be able to talk to these community members about their representation in this installation. Can you speak about the collaboration that you had with the community advisory group? How their input and perspectives shaped this installation?

[00:27:57] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: I think, I mean, one of the resounding things that we heard from our community advisors was this notion that Latinos are not a monolith. They wanted us to be able to show and highlight the diversity and the richness of all these traditions.

We also heard from them quite loudly that they did not want a white box. They did not want kind of the static white museum experience. They wanted color, and so we were definitely thinking a lot about that. And then also had to bring in some of the design elements of these traditions and civilizations. Ellen spoke earlier about the shapes in the galleries and the paint treatments and how those were referencing some of these traditions.

[00:28:38] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Yeah, I mean, we had an advisory board that was comprised of people from a range of different national origins because specifically this question of the complexity of “what is Latino identity? What is Latin American identity?” It is not only Mexico, it’s not only Peru, it is not only Puerto Rico, it is not only the Dominican Republic and all of those are so diverse from each other, and people may not realize that.

So we had 12 different advisors. They came from a range of different countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Columbia, Puerto Rico. We met five different times and they really gave us a lot of input from, you know, what is our overarching idea? How does that feel? And the graphic identity, the colors and the shapes.

[00:29:27] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Also they really helped us solidify, you know, of course Ellen and I always wanted there to be bilingual text in the galleries, but their resounding support of that idea was really helpful for us as we really kind of saw it to fruition.

So you will see some bilingual content in the galleries as well as, of course, the book itself is bilingual as well. I would also say that we’ve worked with focus groups in addition to the community advisors, and they were very critical in kinda solidifying a title for this exhibition. So we had presented one title and we got a lot of feedback that they did not like it, which is more than okay. And actually the title that we landed on was one that arose from that focus group. It’s something that kind of originated within that community group instead of from within curatorial.

[00:30:17] Karena Ingram, host: Yeah. Well, it’s clear that this installation is really a celebration of the Latine community through art, through design, through its openness, and being able to be a free resource for people.

And so then my final question to you both, if you had to sum it up in one quick sentence, what are the defining features of the installation Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano. I know, I saved the hard one for last, I feel like.

[00:30:42] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Defining features. Wow. That is a very big question.

I would say that you know more so than other places, I think that at the heart of it is that these are living cultures and these are not objects of the past that stay in the past, but they are continuing to be interpreted and remembered. And, kind of, they’re markers of social memory for individuals. You know, not just individuals within Latin America, but individuals here in the United States that might have roots in Latin America or connections to those communities.

And I think that’s something that’s really important for individuals to take away from this exhibition and this installation.

[00:31:24] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Yeah, agreed. I would say one of the themes would be that these are very living cultures. That there is a thread within identity in Latin America that continues, and has resisted the extermination of the idea that there are living presences in the Americas, be that plants, animals, minerals, parts of the landscape, and ancestors that are understood to be living in a way that perhaps does not fall within Western classifications. And that there is a reciprocal relationship that is held with those entities:

the landscape, your ancestors, that mutual care for those is a really important part of these cultures. And I guess also just to say that there’s so many cultures. So many cultures. It is so far beyond the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya, but so many cultures making these complex, sophisticated works of art that we’re drawing on truly ingenious ways of working and ways of obtaining materials in a way that still follow these tenets of mutual care between people and materials.

[00:32:37] Karena Ingram, host: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Thank you both so much for coming on Free Admissions and telling us more about this incredible installation.

[00:32:44] Patricia Lagarde, co-curator: Thank you.

[00:32:45] Ellen Hoobler, co-curator: Thank you.

[00:33:08] Karena Ingram, host: To learn more about the installation, Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano, visit TheWalters.org/Americas.

We’ve heard about the defining features of Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano from the perspectives of the curators, but what about an artist? There’s no better person that comes to mind than artist Jessy DeSantis, whose work Cintli, Corn, Maíz is featured in Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano.

Picture it: a four-foot painting of a large ear of corn with beautiful multicolored kernels. The leaves of the corn husk transform into the long tailed feathers of a quetzal bird. The more you gaze at each kernel and the vibrant feathers, the more you see the connection between plants and animals of the Americas.

To hear more about Cintli, Corn, Maíz and connecting with their heritage through art, here’s Jessy DeSantis.

[00:34:03] Jessy DeSantis: My name is Jessy DeSantis. I’m a self-taught artist. I am based in Baltimore. I was raised in Miami to a Nicaraguan household. Like I said, I’m self-taught, so I really just trying to figure out my art style when I started. I think I started seriously painting in 2018 and I really love to like focus on subject matter.

So a lot of my artwork has negative space, which is like white space and then you have the subject in the middle. So I would say that is kind of my art style. It’s usually acrylic or oils on canvas. It’s pretty basic, but I’m trying to really branch out and learn more. And I do that so much, like having been in the art scene, I’ve learned so much from Baltimore artists.

So Cintli, Corn, Maíz is of this corn that I grew in my backyard in Reservoir Hill, Baltimore. The initial idea was to create masa, which is what we used to create tortillas and tamales. And I’m from Nicaragua, so I was really researching our foods and what they meant, and what they mean. Things that I didn’t learn growing up.

So I planted it. I didn’t grow enough of it because you need like hundreds of cobs, but I grew a few and I just, I was so proud. I felt like it was a reconnection with the land, with ancestors. And I decided then to paint it.

So that wasn’t my intention to paint it, but I did. And it’s like in a very Christ-like, or like, you know, form. But it’s intentional because like we are people of corn, we’re made of this and this is like who we are. It’s also in, and I’ve learned like recently, like it’s in our creation story. So, I studied like the Popol Vuh and Aztec religion and it’s like, you know, corn is very fundamental to us as a people.

I incorporate birds a lot in my paintings because they embody spirituality, so it’s like that element of magical realism. And with these corn husks, they were naturally really long, and I’ve never seen like, corn like this, like in the grocery stores, you wouldn’t see it that way. And they were beautiful and flowy, and it reminded me of quetzales, which I have painted before, and is a sacred bird like to Central America, MesoAmerica, and it is also Guatemala’s national bird. It’s like their currency. If you go far back, like pre-colonial times, quetzal feathers, they were a currency, you know? And you could find quetzal feathers all the way up north to Arizona with indigenous trades.

So I wanted to add that element of magical realism to the painting. I started taking pictures in different lights, and I still have these photos. I have like my mom holding it. I have it outside. And the kernels, they’re not like just yellow. They’re like these different colors, right? They’re purple, some of them were like a little green and orange. There’s different colors in them, and I thought they were so beautiful. And the sunlight just naturally captured those colors and the essence.

So, I started like taking my reference photograph. I picked a canvas that was pretty large, but I liked to work in large formats and just started sketching out the corn.

[00:37:17] Karena Ingram, host: How does it feel having your work in Latin American Art?

[00:37:20] Jessy DeSantis: Wow, this is a huge accomplishment, and I just really appreciate how the Walters opened up like an advisory board and brought in community voices, who had like real concerns and real feedback about all the work and the exhibition, and how open and the conversations were between the Walters and the community.

It really adds a lot of value to having my work here. I really appreciate the way the Latin American exhibition was curated by Ellen and Patricia, and we had a conversation earlier about how, you know, right now this is what the community’s comfortable with and that can change. The fact that the Walters is open to that dialogue, whatever it may be in the future, is, you know, it’s nice.

[00:38:07] Karena Ingram, host: Is there anything you’d like to say to other like Latine/Latinx artists who are pursuing their passions?

[00:38:13] Jessy DeSantis: Yeah, I actually had a speech yesterday at UMBC for May Day, May 1st, which is like rooted in labor rights, and it’s also when they celebrate Immigration Appreciation Day. And someone asks like, you know, “you have these young students, what advice do you have for them?”

And I think what’s been most important and I feel like has like fueled my success, is just being authentic. Authentic about what you care about, what your passions are, what you like. Because no matter like where you go into, like in career or whatever, like you’re gonna be fulfilled, you’re gonna be passionate, and you’ll make an impact.

[00:38:48] Karena Ingram, host: So this is the last plug. Let people know where they can find you on your socials and websites, projects coming up.

[00:38:54] Jessy DeSantis: Yeah, I’m more active on Instagram. Projects that I’m currently working on: I am painting my third community fridge in Green Mount West. You can find me on Instagram @JDesantisArt. I also have a website, JDeSantisArt.com, and thank you for having me.

[00:39:12] Karena Ingram, host: Yeah, of course.

Thanks so much, Jessy. You can see simply Cintli, Corn, Maíz on view in Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano

[00:39:24] Major support of Latin American Art / Arte Latinoamericano is provided by the John G. Bourne Fund for The Exhibition of the Arts of the Ancient Americas. This installation is also generously supported by Matt Polk and Amy Gould, The Terra Foundation for American Art, The Hilde Voss Eliasberg Fund for Exhibitions, the Estate of Rosalee and Richard Davison, contributors to the Gary Vikan Exhibition Endowment Fund, Judy and Scott Phares, The Walters Women’s Committee Legacy Endowment, and Supporters of the Walters Art Museum, with additional support from The Francis D. Murnaghan, Jr. Fund for Scholarly Publications, and the Sara Finnegan Lycett Publishing Endowment.

This installation has been made possible in part by a major grant from the Institute of Maryland and Library Services. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this installation do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of the Museum and Library Services or other funders.

Free access to the Walters Art Museum online and in person is made possible through the combined generosity of individual donors, foundations, corporations, and grants from The City of Baltimore, Maryland State Arts Council, Citizens of Baltimore County, Howard County Government, and Howard County Arts Council.

To learn more about engaging with or supporting the Walters, visit TheWalters.org/give.

A big thanks to Ellen Hoobler, Patricia Lagarde, and Jessy DeSantis for chatting with us today. Free Admissions, the Walters Art Museum podcast, is made possible by Marketing and Communications Director Connie McAllister, Communications Manager Sydney Adamson, Head of Graphic Design Tony Venne, Graphic Designer Rachel Minier, Web Manager Dylan Kinnett, Content Writer Erin Branigan, IT Specialist Frank Dickerson, and edited and hosted by me, Karena Ingram.

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