Exhibition | Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: Pinturas de Casta and the Construction of American Identity

Event Details

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston will present works from Colombian American artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez’s Casta Paintings series.

Friedemann-Sánchez’s paintings reference casta painting, a genre popularized in eighteenth-century Spanish Colonial Central and South America that purported to depict a racial and social taxonomy of children born of racially mixed couplings. Friedemann-Sánchez’s contemporary casta paintings take inspiration from this problematic genre to reflect on the legacy of colonialism that lingers in the racial and social discrimination and marginalization present in her home country of Colombia and here in the United States. The paintings feature life-size tracings of female bodies adorned with floral imagery lifted from both the indigenous resin technique of mopa mopa and Spanish colonial iconography. Masks from across Latin America and the Caribbean are included to represent stereotypes born of colonial-era mixed-race classifications that continue to perpetuate today.

"Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: Pinturas de Casta and the Construction of American Identity" is on view May 13 - July 16, 2022.

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