Worldmaking Across the Colonial Sphere: Art and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Spanish Americas became a terrain where objects, images, people, and ideas from Europe, Africa, and Asia intersected, and remade one another under the pressures of local practices and demands. This seminar reconsiders the patterns and fluxes of artistic and intellectual circulation in the early modern period from the vantage point of colonial spaces, considered as generative centers of worldmaking. At the center of the seminar stands an eighteenth-century desk and bookcase from Puebla in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—a European furniture type reimagined through Asian pictorial vocabularies and Indigenous cartographic models to depict a local landscape populated by African subjects. This object serves as case study and methodological guide: a material site where global circulation, artisanal labor, racial representation, and epistemic ordering converged.