A photograph of a cream ceramic vase with a human figure painted on it.
We Live in Painting:The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art
Sep
15
2024
Nov
8
2024
Sep
1
2025

Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they (quite literally) made the world. The power of color emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. Color mapped the very order of the cosmos, of time and space. By engineering and deploying color, artists wielded the power of cosmic creation in their hands. We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. Histories of colonialism and industrialization in the “color-averse” West have minimized the deep significance of color in the Indigenous Americas. This exhibition follows two interconnected lines of inquiry—technical and material analyses, and Indigenous conceptions of art and image—to reach the full richness of color at the core of Mesoamerican worldviews.

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Exhibition catalog.

Roll-out photo of Cylinder Vessel with Palace Scene, 740-800. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Purchased with funds provided by Camilla Chandler Frost. ©2017 Museum Associates/ LACMA Conservation Center, by Yosi Pozeilov.

Admission required

LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles

MON-TUE:11am-6pm
WED:CLOSED
THU:11am-6pm
FRI:11am-8pm
SAT-SUN:10am-7pm

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