HUM 3300 Central American Art and Culture
48 hours: 4 hours per week
I.COURSE DESCRIPTION:
A survey of Central American art covering twenty centuries of aesthetic and cultural
production: Pre-Conquest, Colonial, Baroque, Independence, Modern and Contemporary.
We will examine the ways literature, spaces, architecture, decorative arts, and images
have functioned across a broad spectrum of history, region, and culture in what are now
the Central American countries.
The primary goal of this course is to present a broad survey of Central America
society. While assuming no background or prior knowledge, it transcends normal
academic boundaries, incorporating the insights of several disciplines including: aesthetic,
sociology, iconology, and formalism, among others. Understanding Latin America and
Central America requires familiarity with themes, concepts and facts. Consequently, while
following the general contours of Central American art, we will take up social, cultural,
economic, and political issues which have been important in shaping its art expressions
and its contemporary cultural patterns. This course seeks to comprehend the region from
multiple cultural perspectives and to provide a broad conceptual overview of Central
America and its people.
Selected Art samples that specifically reflect the social, political, religious, and
intellectual contexts in which they have emerged. The broad chronological framework of
the works will highlight special moments in the Central American historical and cultural
heritage. First, it will assess the claim of Central America aesthetics to cultural values in
terms of an alternative modernist tradition.
Central America was born out of the complex, cataclysmic and oftentimes bloody
encounter between Iberians (people from Spain) and indigenous people. This course will
explore the multiple meanings and impacts of European conquest as well as tracing the
development of these colonial societies until their national independence in the early
nineteenth century. Rather, we will focus on several artistics and cultural themes, including
space and iconography relations between Spaniards, Indians and Africans, images and
representation on the frontier and the city, also strategies which reflect conquest signs and
aesthetic resistance.
II. COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After completing this course, students will be able to successfully demonstrate functional
comprehension of the following objectives:
• To Identify major periods in Central American art history.
• Basic knowledge of specific terms to describe Art expressions from Guatemala, El
Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
• To identify factors which contribute to the development of the artistic styles from
the Pre-Conquest through the present time.
• To identify the elements of each style studied in the course.
• To understand the chronology and evolution process of the artistic expression
through the times and cultures.
• To understand the value, culture, and religion aspects that influences the art
production: architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, and functional objects.
• Development of personal awareness, artistic appreciation, and aesthetic sensibilities.
III. UNITS
UNIT 1: PRE-COLUMBIAN ART, CULTURE AND ARCHITECTURE.
Theme: Indigenous Culture and World View
Topics: This unit is a general overview of major monuments, art styles, themes, and
historical developments. Emphasis will be given to painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Spaces and images from the magical society: Painting, sculpture and Temples. Monolitic
and high relief expressions. Characteristics of Pre-columbian art and its distinction in the
ancient Central America: Precolumbian cultures in Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras, Nicaragua and Panamá. Survey of the spectacular art and architecture of the
ancient Maya of Mexico and Central America focusing on the classic period in the
Lowlands, where this art reached a zenith.
UNIT 2: CONQUEST AND COLONIAL PERIOD. COLONIAL ART, CULTURE AND
ARCHITECTURE.
Theme: Colonial Art, religious icons and Art from cristianity Central America in 1492-1821.
The two cultures European, and indigenous American--whose historical intersection and
collisions beginning in 1492 gave a rise to new hybrid cultures in Central America. The
nature and "hybrid" of the European Art invasion and simbolic conquest of the Americas.
The Columbian exchange; Origins of the European Sense of cultural, art, and ways of
representations; How and why symbolic conquest was possible; craftiness, techniques,
beauty resistance, and indigenous aesthetics struggles; American icon holocaust: The
debate over the role of soul, and Renaissense Spanish Barroque style; colonial
imagination; Forms of European colonialism; The role of Catholic Christianity Art in
colonization: Churches and Sacred places; Mythic archetypes and legitimations of
conquest and colonization. Colonial conceptions of cultural space, image, object and
architecture.
UNIT 3: REPUBLICAN ART AND ENLIGHTENMENT IDEAS. 1821-1897
Theme: Art and Independece. Creating National Simbols and organization of different
kinds of boundaries in Central American nations during the nineteenth centuries.
Topics: The causes and consequences of independence process; Religius imagenerya
and Neoclasical spaces in the culture of the 18th-century, which is an intellectual
movement of western Europe that emphasized the reason and science belongs to the
philosophy, the study of human culture and the natural world. The age of revolutions and
Romantic literature and interchange of art in the latest 18th- and earliest 19th-century
where music, literature departed from neo-classicism and emphasized the sensibility, the
free expression of feelings, nature, and the multiculturalism. Industrialism and exportation
oligarchy culture and the emergence of new forms of sensibility and values during the 19th
century.
UNIT 5: XX CENTURY: 1900-1950
Theme: The intellectual, philosophic, and social roots of modernist modes of thought and
expression in art, images, objects, space, literature, and social thought.
Topics: Modernities, Modernism, and Modernization: Sources, Forms, Histories.
Major writers and literature movements of the period from the XIX century through
Modernist. 19th century cultural hierarchies and their breakdown; The reorientation of
culture at the turn of the century; Nationalism and modernism; Racial stereotypes and
representations of alterities; National character; Realism and magical realism; focuses on
the cultural, economic, and social roots of modernity and the forms modernism has taken
in art, literature, and popular cultures. Turns to contemporary issues revolving around
policy, politics, and practices of multiculturalism, pluralism, and cultural nationalism within
the context of the changing ways in which Central America is being imagined and
contested
Unit 6: XX CENTURY: 1950-2000
Theme: The art significance and social class in Central America nowadays. The identity of
cultural politics at the end of the twentieth century.
Topics: On-going debates over pluralism and multiculturalism in art and representation;
the contrasting and contradictory trends toward global integration and particularism, global
art. It will raise the issue of gaining/loosing regional identity in both art and art theory in the
recent past (due to posmodernism) and in the present (due to globalization). Recent
theoretical developments in western visual culture studies and urban issues. We will
examine the most deeply embedded assumptions regarding the history, practices, and
meanings of modern art. Among the principal issues to be analyzed are the following: the
claim of Western modernist aesthetics to universal currency, its assertion of an essential
connection between visual arts and social reconstruction, and its belief in a revolutionary
unfolding of history through central american visual and literature culture.
IV.TEACHING METHODS
Through class lectures, readings, films, power point presentations, guest speakers.
Participants are expected to be familiar with the readings and to be prepared to discuss
them. Critiques and discussions should act as major motivators for the participants, unlike
the situation of the traditional lecture-format.
V.EVALUATION
20 % Essay and Creative Proyect presentation: Research project/presentation (each
country)
30% Readings and Last Essay
10% Participation and attendance.
30% Field trip reports.
10% Film report
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100% total
Essay
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