ART HISTORY FACULTY

 

Elizabeth Hill Boone

Office: 313 Woldenberg Art Bldg.
Phone: (504) 314-2204
email: eboone@tulane.edu

CV

Elizabeth Boone (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1977) is a specialist in the Precolumbian and early colonial art of Latin America, with an emphasis on Mexico. Formerly Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, she has taught art history at Tulane since 1995. In 2006-8 she was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Her research interests, which range from the history of collecting to systems of writing and notation, are grounded geographically in Aztec Mexico but extend temporally for at least a century after the Spanish invasion.

Her most recent book is a synthetic analysis of the Mexican divinatory and religious codices (Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate, Texas Press, 2007), which explains the figural vocabulary of the sacred calendar and its prophetic forces, but focuses on the graphic structures that unite the two. The book also reinterprets the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia as a Mexican cosmogony. This book is conceptualized as a companion to her Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Texas Press, 2000), which won the Arvey Prize of the Association for Latin American Art.

Her current project is an analysis of the major genres of manuscripts painted after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, when indigenous rulers, intellectuals, and artists/writers adjusted to new forms of graphic expression but still maintained their rich tradition of figural pictography. In this she is particularly interested in how indigenous pictography adapted under the influence of European script and image-making, and why it retained its agency as a container of truth. Her research at the CASVA (2006-8) focused on European textual and pictorial precedents for the pictorial catechisms and cultural encyclopedias that developed uniquely in early colonial Mexico.

Her overriding interest is in the way knowledge is recorded graphically: how, for example, stories about the past can be told pictorially and how religious and mantic concepts can be expressed solely through images. She is interested also in understanding the circumstances in which visual thinking and pictorial expression prove to be more effective than logo-syllabic scripts.

Courses taught recently at Tulane:

• Art Survey I: Prehistory through the Middle Ages
• Mesoamerican Art (upper division lecture course)
• Colonial Art of Latin America (upper division lecture course)
• Aztec Art (senior /graduate level seminar)
• Aztec Iconography (graduate seminar)
• Seminar on Mexican Manuscript Painting (senior/graduate level seminar)
• Colonial Art of Latin America (graduate lecture/seminar)
• Seminar on Images and Meaning (graduate seminar)