Aztec to Zapotec: Pre-Columbian Art at the OMA

Currently on view at the Orlando Museum of Art, Aztec to Zapotec: Selections from the Ancient Americas Collection features more than 180 works made prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Europeans during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Representing a span of more than 3,000 years, the exhibition is drawn from the OMA’s comprehensive Art of the Ancient Americas Collection and gives a rare glimpse into the life and culture of numerous civilizations from the North, Central and South American regions. Significant ancient works of gold, silver, jade, ceramic, shell and wood are included from the cultures of the Aztec, Maya, Moche, Nasca, Inca and Zapotec.

View the official website.

Male effigy jar  -  Recuay, Peru  -  100–300 CE

Nose pendant  -  Yotoco (Calima), Colombia  -  1–800 CE

Figural urn  -  Zapotec, Mexico  -  300–600 CE

Information and images courtesy of the Orlando Museum of Art

Children of the Plumed Serpent at LACMA

Recent scholarship demonstrates that a confederacy of city-states in southern Mexico, largely dominated by Nahua, Mixtec, and Zapotec nobility, successfully resisted both Aztec and Spanish subjugation. Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico explores the extraordinary wonders in fresco, codices, polychrome ceramics, gold, turquoise, shell, textiles, and other precious materials that were produced by these confederacies between AD 1200 and 1500, as their influence spread throughout Mesoamerica by means of vast networks of trade and exchange. A ruling class of nobles, or caciques, believing that Quetzalcoatl, the human incarnation of the Plumed Serpent, had founded their royal lineages, called themselves the "Children of the Plumed Serpent"; they resurrected themselves and continued to affect cultural development in Mesoamerica during a dramatic period of social transformation.  On view April 1–July 1, 2012.

View the LACMA website.

Pendant Depicting a Ruler in Ritual Regalia  -  Culture unknown  -  AD 1200–1521

Detail of the Codex Selden  -  Mexico  -  AD 1556–60

 

Images and text courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art