The following reflection on a museum exhibit was initially written for the course LIS 717: History on Display: Museums, Exhibitions, and Public History. Our assignment was to visit a free museum of our choosing in the Chicago area and write about a singular exhibit. The instructions emphasized analyzing the aesthetic choices of the display, including the lighting, paint colors, case materials, use of glass, interactivity, chronology, relationship of the exhibit to the visitor's body, and more. These guiding concepts brought the unique attributes of this exhibit into a sharper focus.

 

The “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra ‘Calidad’” exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art features Delilah Montoya's photography, presenting the multicultural lives on the Mexican borderlands and Southwest United States ("Contemporary Casta"). This project is a commentary on 18th-century Casta paintings. These works typically stood as a series of sixteen paintings that promote the colonial framework of racial hierarchy by asserting that Spanish blood was gradually degraded through mixed-race families with Indian and African ancestry (Leibsohn, Mundy). Montoya created a series of sixteen candid photos and utilized 21st-century genetic DNA tests to track the subjects' ancestry as far as 10,000 years back. Her work demonstrates that race and culture are socially constructed and not an exact science or natural order. 

The entry of the exhibit presents a series of five reproduced casta paintings ranging from a Spanish couple and their child portrayed with dignity to more disruptive portraits of mixed-race families. These paintings are placed against a bright orange wall with painted frames. The viewer is met with the symbol of sophistication that turns out to be two-dimensional. Denying these paintings the authority of a traditional frame and keeping them out of glass disrupts the absolutism the paintings imply. To the left of these paintings is black text on a beige section of the wall explaining the conceit of the exhibition and more information on the artist.

 

Montoya's photos are placed on the room's beige walls, allowing the viewer to walk through in a circle to view all the pieces. They are framed in modern, simplistic wood box frames with a wood panel underneath. This section holds a black-and-white map with a test tube of sand on either side. Each tube is labeled with a familial designation, as the sand symbolizes the individual’s ancestry. The map establishes the regions the family is from and the casta to which the family would be assigned. 

 

In the above photo (click here for the photo, map, and accompanying audio), the left sand represents the mother's brother while the right represents the father. In the middle of the exhibit, a glass box stood with a book on casta paintings and the labeled colors of sand. In this example, the mother’s brother is represented in orange sand indicating Native American ancestry, and the father is represented in white sand, indicating northern European ancestry. The other options for sand were Mediterranean, southwest Asian, southwest Asian, northeast Asian, south African, and Sub-Saharan. 

        The photos are not in order of caste, which disrupts the idea of progressive ‘dilution’ of Spanish blood. As the participants were from the same regions of Texas and New Mexico, this created a sense of neighborhood and integrated community in a way the original Casta paintings rejected. While this exhibit utilizes test tubes, maps, and Casta classifications to demonstrate scientific analysis of its subjects, the placing of the photos works to reinforce that the artist intends to present each family with equal respect and humanity. 

This project's source material is based on treating non-Spanish people as lesser objects rather than embodied subjects. While approaching the same form through different intentions, Montoya and the exhibit curators had to create an intentional presentation that combated the original point of view. The artists creating Casta paintings had immense power and control, both politically and in the act of creation since they were painters rather than photographers. Montoya’s choice to photograph candid scenes and the supplemental text box that explains that these scenes were part of one-hour sessions are both powerful objections to the impersonal colonial perspective. 

As visitors walk around the room, they can scan QR codes on the photos that link to “family monologues” where the subjects discuss their family history and the photo’s context, as well as another image of the map that illustrates migration. The audio component of this project adds significant context to the images and sand representations. Participants told personal anecdotes, family stories, tragedies, and their journeys to understanding where their families came from. The photos feel intimate and current, while the maps and test tubes feel more distant and historical. Hearing directly from these sources is a necessary bridge that shows the personal narratives the families have regarding their geographic origins. (Click here for the photo, map, and audio of the above image).

       Test tubes denote a sterile, scientific process while sand and wood connect the project to the earth. The colors used for each region somewhat correlate with the skin tones of the ethnic groups represented. The genealogical assessment combined with unposed scenes of domestic lives brings subjectivity to the genre of casta imagery. Montoya and her interviewees show how each unique family has a long history impacted by political forces that changed over time.

Another orange wall section in the center of the room, where the casta paintings were displayed, shows scientific art of reptiles and flowers next to text explaining that the Spanish systematized ethnographic hierarchy in the context of similar ideas about race rampant in the Enlightenment Era. Another text box explains DNA tracing and the intention behind pursuing it for the project. These text portions are kept brief and include both English and Spanish translations, as was consistent throughout the museum. This informational center of the space didn’t distract from the circular experience of walking from photo to photo but still made context a priority. 

The wall with the exit door is blank other than a short profile on the artist, which features a photo of her next to black text on a grey rectangle, and a large quote from her placed above in bold black text. The quote states that the exhibit is an “investigation of culture and biological forms of ‘hybridity’” intended to show viewers the “resonance of colonialism as a substructure of our contemporary society that was constructed by an imposition of sovereignty.” This quote is also placed in Spanish above a section of the portraits in the same font and size. Looking up to see these quotes high on the walls created a sense that the artist was overlooking the exhibit.

           This room is one of the first doors a visitor could walk through when entering the museum. It is next to the large gift store, which led me to visit it right before leaving. Its light and neutral walls differ from the rest of the museum, which uses the orange featured on one wall of this exhibit heavily throughout other rooms, as well as blue, pink, and yellow. The wall color and bright white lighting complement the unadorned photography in creating a sense of authenticity. The space is smaller than other rooms and not connected to any other exhibit. This allowed the work to excel in its self-contained 16-part scale. 

 

Works Cited:

“Contemporary Casta Portraiture:  Nuestra ‘Calidad.’” National Museum of Mexican Art, Pilsen, Chicago. Accessed 2024. https://nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/events/contemporary-casta-portraiture.

Leibsohn, Dana, and Barbara E. Mundy. “Casta Painting.” VistasGallery, 2015. https://vistasgallery.ace.fordham.edu/items/show/1659.

Montoya, Delilah. “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra Calidad.” Contemporary Casta portraiture: Nuestra calidad. Accessed 2024. http://www.delilahmontoya.com/ContempCasta/.