The talk will explain how various textile types from the Pre-Columbian Americas were adapted to create Catholic church ornaments beginning in the sixteenth century. Examples will be drawn from each of the chapters of Dr. Stanfield-Mazzi’s new book, Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820. She will conclude by showing ways in which some of these traditions survive to today.

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi is an art historian specializing in art of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America, especially that of the colonial Andes. She focuses on the ways in which Indigenous peoples of the Americas contributed to creating new forms of Catholicism. She has published articles in Current Anthropology, Hispanic Research Journal, Colonial Latin American Review, Religion and the Arts, and The Americas. She also wrote bibliographic essays on painting in the Viceroyalty of Peru and Andean textiles for Oxford Bibliographies Online.