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New Worlds "Discover" Asia Lisa Lowe Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia, curated by Dennis Carr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, August 18, 2015-February 15, 2016.
Among the extraordinary pieces collected in the exhibit Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia, at the Museum Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, is a mid-eighteenth-century desk and bookcase made in Puebla, Mexico (fig. 1). The piece, possibly commissioned by Pedro José Ovando de Rivadeneira or a member of the Gaspar Miguel de Rivadeneira Osorio y de Cervantes family, was crafted by mestizo artisans out of imported traditions and indigenous materials. The outside of the desk is decorated in a Moorish pattern of inlaid wood and engraved and painted bone, typical of Islamic architecture that derived from the eight centuries of Moorish occupation of southern Spain that ended with the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Yet the writing desk with tall bookcase is fashioned after a traditional Anglo-Dutch style bureau, rather than a Spanish one, with wood embellishments that allude to Dutch ripple moldings and German engraving techniques. Moreover, when the cabinet is opened, the interior is painted in a striking red and gold chinoiserie style, in keeping with an achinado tradition in which Latin American artists borrowed and embellished Chinese and Japanese styles of furniture, china, silver, and textiles that had been imported from Manila to Acapulco during the 250 years of the Manila galleon trade. While achinado designs and techniques may echo Asian ones, they are distinctly Latin American, and in this way the desk makes reference to European and Asian artisanal styles, and evokes the complex histories of colonialism, slavery, indenture, and transhemispheric trades.
On the red interior of the desk's two cabinet doors is the representation of a map of a Veracruz plantation, adorned with symbols that the curator Dennis Carr has identified as Nahuatl hieroglyphs or pictographs for representing towns and estates, rivers, and mountains. Figured in the maps and on the desk drawers are scenes of plantation life that include ranchers and farmhands, among them free blacks or enslaved men, on the one hand, and mythical warriors, unicorns, elephants, reindeer, birds, and lions, on the other. Positioned centrally in the spatial layout of the larger exhibit itself, the Puebla...