[Aztlan] Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas Exhibit

[michael ruggeri]

Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas

February 9 - May 18, 2008

Museum of Art and Archaeology
1 Pickard Hall
Columbia, MO
The ancient civilizations of the Americas represent distinct and  
unique artistic traditions, sharing an emphasis on art as a vehicle  
for communicating symbolic and cosmological meanings. Featuring  
ceramics, textiles, featherwork, and objects of stone, metal and  
shell, Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas  
highlights both the range of iconographic forms found throughout the  
pre-Columbian New World, and the complexity of interpreting their  
meanings in a post-Columbian setting. The exhibition includes works  
ranging from the Peruvian highlands and Amazon Basin through  
Mesoamerica to ancient Missouri.

Drawn mainly from objects in the Museum’s permanent collections -  
some never before exhibited - the exhibition focuses on textiles,  
pottery and metalwork, the areas of greatest emphasis and achievement  
in the surviving art and artifacts of pre-Columbian societies.  
Ranging from Mayan polychrome glyphic vases to ancient featherwork of  
South America, from ancient Andean textiles to fragments of friezes  
from the great Mexican city of Teotihuacan, and featuring gold from  
the isthmus of Panama to the effigy vessels of Colima and Moche,  
Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas showcases the  
breadth of artistic achievements of the ancient Americas, and  
provides insights into the iconographic meanings of the works’ rich  
symbolism.

Iconography - or the interpretation of the content of  
representational art, identifying the narratives depicted and giving  
meaning and movement to static images - represents a key aspect of  
understanding and appreciating artistic expression. For much of the  
art of the ancient Americas those narratives are lost or fragmentary,  
and scholars have focused not only on what representational art means  
but also how it means, on how the meanings of pre-Columbian art can  
be reconstructed by systematically studying how meaning is  
communicated, constructed and construed. . . .

Complex pre-Columbian societies were not limited to Central and South  
America. Complex societies arose right here in the midcontinent as  
well; Monk’s Mound, just outside modern-day St. Louis at the Cahokia  
site, is a Mississippian-period mound that’s a thousand feet long, a  
hundred feet high, and larger in basal area than the Great Pyramid in  
Egypt. Some scholars believe that at its maximum extent a millennium  
ago Cahokia was larger than London. One of the remarkable artworks  
included in Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas is  
the so-called Fairfield Gorget, an engraved marine shell ornament  
carved on a whelk from the Gulf Coast, depicting a Central American  
ocelot and found in a Woodland period mound from ancient Missouri. . . .

http://maa.missouri.edu/exhibitions.html



Mike Ruggeri's Ancient America Museum Exhibitions, Conferences and  
Lectures
http://community-2.webtv.net/Topiltzin-2091/AncientAmerica/index.htm