Annotated Bibliography

Mirkala Huffman

HU1111

1/21/22
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Alva, Walter. “The Royal Tombs of Sipán: Art and Power in Moche Society.

Studies in the History of Art 63 “(2001): 230. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42622323.

This article goes more into depth about the archaeological finds of The Royal Tombs of

Sipán and what the significance of the iconography was meant to be for the Moche

people. There are many photographs included of the finds, which will be good visual

evidence for my essay when formally analyzing certain Moche pieces of art.

Magid, Jill. The Proposal. Field of Vision, 2018. 1 hr 23 min. http://www.jillmagid.com/film.

Jill Magid’s The Proposal follows conceptual artist Jill Magid as she follows the trail to

find one of the most famous Mexican artists Luis Barragán’s archive of work. This

journey for the hidden archive of Luis Barragán leads Magid into the legal battle between

Mexico and the private owner of the works Federica Zanco, who works under the name

The Barragan Foundation. The film delves deeper into the issue of the ethics of private

ownership of works that may arguably deserve to be in their home country. It takes no

particular stance outright, but it is an excellent example of modern “colonization” of art,

similar in a way to the Spaniards looting Moche works.

Pearce, Adrian J. “Colonial Coda: The Andes–Amazonia Frontier under Spanish Rule.” In

Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide: A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration, edited by

Adrian J. Pearce, David G. Beresford-Jones, and Paul Heggarty, 313–24. UCL Press,

2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13xps7k.32.

This article includes a section going into detail about the statistics for how many Incan

people died from the effects of Spanish colonization. It tells us that Spanish colonization
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wiped out nearly 90% of the Incan population, most of it due to the spread of disease the

Incan people didn’t have an immunity against. I will mostly use this resource for those

statistics, it does also include some interesting information about how parts of Andean

culture was able to survive colonization more than Amazonian culture, “[sustaining] a

relatively firm frontier, for several centuries after the arrival of Europeans in the New

World.”

Wood, Michael. Conquistadors. BBC Digital, 2015.

Michael Wood’s Conquistadors analyzes the conquest of South America by Spanish

explorers with accounts from both the sides of the conquest, European and Native. I’m

particularly looking at the chapter about the conquest of the Incas by Francisco Pizarro

and Almagro Ruiz. This is to use the firsthand accounts in the book to understand what

the conquistadors were looking for in the Americas, and how their looting affected the

way we perceive Native American artwork in the modern day. There is a connection

between the dehumanization of South and Central American artwork during this time of

looting and the way that this still stolen artwork is represented in museums today. This

chapter helps to draw that connection, understanding the historical context of the problem

of Native American representation in museums.

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Western arts." Encyclopedia Britannica.

https://www.britannica.com/art/Western-arts.

I am using Britannica’s definition of “Western arts” to prove a point about our

understanding of what is considered Western. This binary system of categorizing

different cultures around the world into two categories cheapens the differences between

all of these cultures, especially when those two categories are European/European
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descended and other. Historically speaking, the study of art history is riddled with racial

bias because many of the founders of the academic study are commonly European or

European descended white men. This example serves to show that even in academic

sources, this bias shows, and it presents an ethical problem in the way that the academic

world understands, or perhaps doesn’t understand, Native American artwork.