Dr. Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Muhlenberg College
Presenting “Bodily Dichotomies and Racialization: The Case of Vicente Albán’s Quito Paintings”
A series of six paintings (c. 1783) executed by Quiteño artist Vicente Albán showcase local human types including Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples. The paintings were created as part of a royal-sponsored series of botanical expeditions to the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada (modern day Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela). Alongside human figures Albán carefully labeled both local and imported fruits and vegetables, thereby showcasing the bounty of the land. Clearly intended to instruct a foreign (European) audience, the paintings have been understood as byproducts of the Hispanic Enlightenment and related interest in taxonomy, or scientific categorization of the natural world. Yet while the paintings certainly showcase burgeoning scientific thinking, they remain marred in a visual tradition that communicated ideas about class and hierarchy rather than empirically observed individuals. Using dress, bodily comportment, idealization and exaggeration of parts of the body linked to ideas around purity and otherness, the Albán series offers a nuanced look at the ways that the visual arts both reflected and reified fledgling ideas around what we now call race.
Dr. FitzPatrick Sifford is a specialist in the art of colonial Latin America. She received her Ph.D. from The City University of New York and is now an assistant professor of art history at Muhlenberg College where she teaches courses in Renaissance, Baroque, and Latin American art. Her most recent work investigates the depicting of Africans in the visual culture of colonial Mexico and Peru. “Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas” was published in Ethnohistory (Duke University Press, 2019), and “A Fly in Milk: Fears of Black (In)visibility in New Spanish Painting,” was published in Emotions, Art, and Religion in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, c. 1400-1800 (Brill, 2021).
She has also worked with a colleague at Cornell University, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, on several projects addressing issues of diversity and inclusion in the field of art history. They conducted a survey to gather data regarding faculty of color in the professoriate in order to widen the pathway to a more diverse and equitable field of Latin American art history. That resulted in publications entitled “Addressing Diversity and Inclusion in Latin American Art,” in Latin American and Latinx Visual Cultures and “A Call to Action” in Art Journal.