We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art

Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with colour, they (quite literally) made the world. The power of colour emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. Colour mapped the very order of the cosmos, of time and space. By engineering and deploying colour, artists wielded the power of cosmic creation in their hands. We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art explores the science, art, and cosmology of colour in Mesoamerica. Histories of colonialism and industrialization in the “colour-averse” West have minimized the deep significance of colour in the Indigenous Americas. This exhibition follows two interconnected lines of inquiry—technical and material analyses, and Indigenous conceptions of art and image—to reach the full richness of colour at the core of Mesoamerican worldviews.