María Carrillo Marquina

In seventeenth-century New Spain, membership to Afro-Latin American confraternities provided social, spiritual, and economic benefits for their members—freed and enslaved. For these brotherhoods, the processes of commissioning, selecting, purchasing, and caring for objects were a method to craft a collective material identity. In the field of Afro-Atlantic histories, literature on Black confraternal organizations in the Spanish Americas is thin, and practically nonexistent within the field of art history. Thus, “Sculpting Identity” considers Afro-Latin Americans as custodians and makers of Catholic visual and material culture. The object corpus consists of Black sodalities’ sculptures, paintings, and liturgical goods that survive alongside an, at times, sparse archival record. This project employs iconographical, comparative, and archival approaches to the study of Black confraternal material culture to understand how the object choices of Black brothers reflect an understanding of a dynamic Afro-Latin American identity.