The Art of Inca Sovereignty

Undergraduate / Graduate

Inca art has often been described as abstract-but it was created before twentieth-century Euro-American concepts of abstraction even existed. While earlier Andean cultures produced a great deal of representational art, as well as motifs and styles that recurred from one culture to the next, Inca art can be geometric and something of an anomaly within the artistic traditions of the region. What caused this marked shift? And how might we interpret it? While surviving objects present one corpus of information, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and Quechua texts offer additional understandings of how objects were used within the Inca Empire and what they potentially meant. Inca art produced after the Spanish invasion further manifests how this artistic canon transformed under colonial European influences. Early art historical analyses also logged distinct reads of Inca art, decrying it as repetitive and even boring. On the one hand, this course offers a deeper understanding of the art and architecture of the largest Indigenous society ever to exist in the Americas; on the other, it tries to get at how we perceive, react to, and evaluate art that is different-perhaps strikingly different-from what we're led to think it should be.