Further Afield: Mother, Daughter, Widow, and Wife

In this virtual talk, Charlene Villaseñor Black, professor of art history and Chicana/o studies, UCLA, asks: How did sacred artworks serve as visual exemplars of gendered behaviors?

Charlene Villaseñor Black, professor of art history and Chicana/o studies at UCLA, presents Further Afield: Mother, Daughter, Widow, and Wife: The Conundrum of Mary in Early Modern Hispanic Art.

Marian devotion is grounded in a conundrum: Mary is both exemplary and ordinary, superior to all other women and a conventional mother, daughter, widow, and wife. Focusing on this paradox in the seventeenth-century Hispanic world, this virtual talk asks: How did sacred artworks serve as visual exemplars of gendered behaviors? How did artists, patrons, and devotees negotiate the contradictions at the heart of Marian veneration?

This talk is related to the exhibition Canvas & Silk: Historic Fashion from Madrid’s Museo del Traje on view at the Meadows Museum until Jan 9, 2022.