Miguel Cabrera, 5. From Spaniard and Mulatto Woman, Morisca (5. De español y mulata, morisca) (detail), 1763. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Courtesy image.
SANTA BARBARA — The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present Art Matters Lecture Series (via Zoom): “Casta Paintings: Picturing Racial Difference in Colonial Mexico” with Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford, Assistant Professor of Art History, Baker Center for the Artsat 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1.
Art Matters returns to SBMA via Zoom! With conversations on special topics in art history, this series presents art historians, curators, and conservators with fascinating insights into their areas of specialization. The series kicks off on October 1 with Casta Paintings: Picturing Racial Difference in Colonial Mexico featuring Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford. For information on the full series, visit www.sbma.net/artmatters.
In the 18th century in Mexico, artists began painting images of couples of different ethnic backgrounds along with their racially-mixed children. Typically, created in sets of 16, each picture showed a different type that was loosely codified in the sistema de castas, a hierarchy that categorized people based on racial mixture. This talk introduces casta paintings and discusses their formal and contextual characteristics, including the impetus for their creation and the significance of the works for those who commissioned and displayed them on both sides of the Atlantic.