Text by Dennis Carr, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Timothy Brook, Mitchell Codding, Karina H. Corrigan, Donna Pierce.
The spectacular arts of the first global age fostered by a rich cultural interchange between Asia and the Americas
Made in the Americas reveals the overlooked history of Asia's profound influence on the arts of the colonial Americas. Beginning in the 16th century, European outposts in the New World, especially those in New Spain, became a major nexus of the Asian export trade. Craftsmen from Canada to Peru, inspired by the sophisticated designs and advanced techniques of these imported goods, combined Asian styles with local traditions to produce unparalleled furniture, silverwork, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, painting and architectural ornaments. Among the exquisite objects featured in this book, from across the hemisphere and spanning the 17th to the early 19th centuries, are folding screens made in Mexico in imitation of imported Japanese and Chinese screens; blue-and-white talavera ceramics copied from Chinese porcelains; luxuriously woven textiles, made to replicate fine silks and cottons from China and India; devotional statues that adapt Buddhist gods into Christian saints; and "japanned" furniture produced in Boston that simulates Asian lacquer finishes. The stories told by the objects gathered in Made in the Americas bring to life the rich cultural interchange and the spectacular arts of the first global age.
Dennis Carr is Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is the author of Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia and Common Wealth.
Gauvin Alexander Bailey is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque, Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.
Timothy Brook holds the Republic of China Chair in the Department of History and Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Mitchell Codding is Executive Director, The Hispanic Society of America, New York.
Karina Corrigan is H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator, Asian Export Art, Peabody Essex Museum.
Donna Pierce is Frederick & Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum.
Featured image is reproduced from Made in the Americas.
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Made in the Americas tells the story of centuries of cross-fertilization that followed the opening of trade between Europe and Asia; the Americas, in the middle of many oceanic routes, was the place where traditions melded in the most imaginative ways.
In "By the Boatload: Receiving and Recreating the Arts of Asia," her chapter in MFA Publications' eye-opening Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia, Denver Art Museum curator of Spanish Colonial Art Donna Pierce writes, "Some of the most highly valued items of furniture from Asia were those polychromed and finished with a lacquered surface, using a technique purported to have been invented in China but expanded and perfected in Japan... Another type of furniture imported from Asia was decorated with inlay, including Japanese examples inlaid with mother-of-pearl on a black lacquer ground as well as tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl pieces from Goa and Gujarat. Spanish-Moorish traditions of inlaid and marquetry furniture merged with Asian examples in the hands of Latin American craftsmen, who created exquisite and distinctive inlay work in a variety of woods, ivory, bone, silver, tortoiseshell and mother of pearl. These pieces were produced in regions throughout the colonies, including Puebla, Campeche and Durango in Mexico; Lima in Peru; Quito in Ecuador; Bogotá in Colombia; Caracas and Cumaná in Venezuela; and Guatemala and Paraguay." Featured example is a cabinet produced in Lima between 1680 and 1700. continue to blog
In the Prologue to Made in the Americas, the catalogue to MFA Boston's critically acclaimed show on Asia's influence on Colonial American art and design, Timothy Brook writes, "The 1769 portrait of the Boston merchant Nicholas Boylston by John Singleton Copley shows him dressed in a long, loose silk robe called a banyan or Indian coat. The term banyan originally referred to India traders or merchants of the seventeenth century, and by 1755 the word became synonymous with the loose-fitting, informal gowns Europeans brought back from India and the Far East. (The Dutch favored especially the Japanese kosode.) Banyans, which became highly popular in Europe in the eighteenth century, were most commonly associated with men (and women) of leisure and mercantile, artistic and intellectual pursuits. In Copley's portrait, the sitter is dressed in a banyan made of a rich brown damask of either European or Chinese manufacture, and he wears a turban or soft cap in place of a wig. While Boylston is depicted self-consciously at east and in casual attire and pose, the pile of account books resting beneath his arm and the view of the ocean in the background clearly refer to the far-flung mercantile empire—partly based on the transshipment of Asian commodities to the American colonies—that had created his enormous wealth. The prominent role of the banyan, a luxury good, in this portrait serves as both a marker of high economic status and a projection of the sitter's worldliness and refinement." continue to blog
"The world as we know it did not exist before the sixteenth century. It existed only in parts," Timothy Brooks writes in Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia, the catalogue to MFA Boston's current exhibition. "Not until the sixteenth century did cartographers in Europe begin to gain access to knowledge on the scale needed to model the world as we now see it. The agents of this transformation were navigators, who were able to travel far enough east and west to stretch the world into new shapes. These voyages to the Americas and Asia ushered in the first age of globalization, when the world’s major landmasses and civilizations learned of each other for the first time and became linked in a worldwide web of exchange. It was a shockingly new vision of the world. On medieval maps Europe was more or less alone in the world. It was taking to the oceans that brought the Americas and Asia onto the map." Detail of Abraham Gessner's double cup, globe and armillary sphere, 1580-90, is reproduced from Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 7.75 x 10.25 in. / 160 pgs / 100 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 GBP £35.00 ISBN: 9780878468126 PUBLISHER: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston AVAILABLE: 9/29/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Text by Dennis Carr, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Timothy Brook, Mitchell Codding, Karina H. Corrigan, Donna Pierce.
The spectacular arts of the first global age fostered by a rich cultural interchange between Asia and the Americas
Made in the Americas reveals the overlooked history of Asia's profound influence on the arts of the colonial Americas. Beginning in the 16th century, European outposts in the New World, especially those in New Spain, became a major nexus of the Asian export trade. Craftsmen from Canada to Peru, inspired by the sophisticated designs and advanced techniques of these imported goods, combined Asian styles with local traditions to produce unparalleled furniture, silverwork, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, painting and architectural ornaments.
Among the exquisite objects featured in this book, from across the hemisphere and spanning the 17th to the early 19th centuries, are folding screens made in Mexico in imitation of imported Japanese and Chinese screens; blue-and-white talavera ceramics copied from Chinese porcelains; luxuriously woven textiles, made to replicate fine silks and cottons from China and India; devotional statues that adapt Buddhist gods into Christian saints; and "japanned" furniture produced in Boston that simulates Asian lacquer finishes. The stories told by the objects gathered in Made in the Americas bring to life the rich cultural interchange and the spectacular arts of the first global age.
Dennis Carr is Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is the author of Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia and Common Wealth.
Gauvin Alexander Bailey is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque, Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.
Timothy Brook holds the Republic of China Chair in the Department of History and Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Mitchell Codding is Executive Director, The Hispanic Society of America, New York.
Karina Corrigan is H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator, Asian Export Art, Peabody Essex Museum.
Donna Pierce is Frederick & Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum.
