Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte

About Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte

Ananda Cohen-Aponte is Associate Professor of History of Art who works on the visual culture of colonial Latin America, with special interests in issues of cross-cultural exchange, historicity, identity, and anti-colonial movements. Her recent book, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes (University of Texas Press, 2016) explores the intersections between art, politics, religion, and society in mural paintings located in colonial churches across the southern Andes.

The Nasca were interested in issues of design and abstraction centuries before the rise of abstract art in the twentieth century.

Nasca Art: Sacred Linearity and Bold Designs

Get to know the richest burial site in the Western hemisphere.

The Moche Royal Tombs of Sipán

Mummies were also buried with offerings of food and jewelry to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. The types of textiles and offerings associated with a mummy bundle shed light on the individual’s social status; the larger and more elaborate the bundle, the higher social standing the person held during his or her life.

Paracas Textiles: An Introduction

Textiles remained important items after the Spanish conquest in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Churches were even painted with textile murals to endow these spaces with sacredness.

Textiles in the Colonial Andes

The arts of colonial Peru are neither fully pre-Columbian nor fully European, but a dynamic combination.

Introduction to the Viceroyalty of Peru

From elaborately adorned mummies and carved gourds to scenes of decapitation, the art of early Andean cultures is varied and complex.

The Earliest Andean Cultures

The Tiwanaku civilization was centered in the Lake Titicaca region of present-day southern Peru and western Bolivia, although its cultural influence spread into Bolivia and parts of Chile and Argentina. Tiwanaku’s main city center boasted a population of 25,000–40,000.

Tiwanaku, an introduction

“For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it / But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Luis de Riaño and indigenous collaborators, The ...

Portraits can be so much more than a person's likeness — they can be personal, commemorative and deeply political.

Portrait Painting in the Viceroyalty of Peru

Sinners depicted along the lower register receive an array of bodily tortures; the souls in heaven, by contrast, surround the ascended Christ in an orderly formation.

Diego Quispe Tito, Last Judgment, 1675

Guaman Poma's “The Bad Confession” image participates in a larger argument about the ability for native Andeans to rule themselves without Spanish intervention.

“Bad Confession” in Guaman Poma’s The First ...

Cuzco School paintings came into such high demand that they were exported to patrons residing in far-flung cities located in present-day Chile and Argentina, and even Italy.

Our Lady of Cocharcas and the ...

Exploring the beginnings of Spanish missionary activities and spaces in Peru.

Introduction to religious art and architecture in ...

The inhabitants of the Andes developed a stunning visual tradition that lasted over 10,000 years before the Spanish invasion in 1532.

Introduction to Ancient Andean Art