RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 5.23.25 MAYA BLUE EXHIBIT

Maya Blue Exhibit Incorporates the Artwork of Latino/a Artists

A new exhibit, Maya Blue: Ancient Color, New Visions, at the San Antonio Museum of Art [SAMA], brings together for the first time pre-Columbian crafted clay figures, the art of Mexican modernist Carlos Mérida, and works by contemporary Latino/a artists Rolando Briseño, Clarissa Tossin, and Sandy Rodríguez whose work also reflects the influence of Maya Blue. The exhibit opened May 12, 2025 and closes in May 2026.

Latin American Art curator Kristopher Drigger explained that to make Maya Blue, ancient Maya communities combined indigo with a special clay, which was itself understood and used as medicine. He added, “Drawing on deep knowledge of materials and land, ancient makers produced blue paint that embellished special objects, including works destined for ritual and offering.” Maya Blue, Drigger noted, “was vibrant and rich in symbolism, evoking vital water, breath, and abundance. It was most often applied to works intended for offering and other ritual contexts.”

Driggers added that for artists working today, “the meanings of the color and the pigment itself remain rich sources of artistic inspiration, becoming a site for thinking critically and creatively about issues like memory, identity, and wellness and the body.”

Maya Relief figure. AD 500-800. Courtesy of SAMA. Photo by Ricardo Romo.
Described as bright turquoise/azure, the blue in Maya Blue is stunning, resembling the Caribbean waters or a bright blue sky. It is an Indigo dye mixed with palygorskite clay (possibly copal incense as binder). When applied to paintings it was viewed as symbolic of rain, sky, water, and fertility and thought to be linked to Mayan gods.

Maya Blue is considered central to Mayan religion and artistic life. Over time archaeologists have connected the color with traditional rituals, sacrifi ces, pottery, murals, textiles, and jewelry. It is exceptionally stable and fade-resistant. The creation of this fabulous color is proof of the ingenuity, artistry, and spiritual depth of the ancient Maya civilization.

The exhibit features Maya Blue paintings and sculptures selected from the vast SAMA collection of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art that houses approximately 10,000 works spanning nearly 4,000 years. The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center is unique for its comprehensive approach, with galleries devoted to pre-Columbian, colonial, modern, contemporary, and popular art.

This exhibit took me back to my graduate years at UCLA in the 1970s when I studied Latin American history and took a class in Meso-American anthropology. I learned that the Maya are renowned for their sophisticated writing system, which used hieroglyphs to record history, astronomy, mathematics, and religion. Their expertise in astronomy and mathematics exceeded that of any other civilization in the world. The Maya were among the first civilizations to use the concept of zero, a mathematical breakthrough that allowed them to write, calculate large sums, and use positional notation. The Maya calendar was more accurate than those of Europe or Asia.

The Maya also excelled in the arts and in construction. In the UCLA class, we studied various art forms, including stone sculpture, stucco reliefs, jade carvings, polychrome murals, and ceramics. The class left me wishing for more knowledge about Mesoamerican culture, and Harriett and I later went to Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala to view the Mayan iconic architectural feats—massive stone pyramids and temples, such as those at Chichen Itza near Merida, the UNESCO Heritage Site of Palenque as it was being excavated, and Tikal in Guatemala. I was pleased that the SAMA exhibit includes two excellent relief sculptures: one from the Classical era 500-800 AD and another from the post-Classic period 1300 AD.

The delicately constructed pre-Columbian figures in the exhibit featuring traces of Maya Blue color come from a Mayan empire that extended from the Yucatan Peninsula to Guatemala and Belize. One of the major Mayan cities is Tikal in Southern Guatemala near the Belize border. The classic Mayan ruins including Tulum and Chichen Itza are in close proximity to Cancun and Yucatán in Southeast Mexico.

Mayan society evolved over a two thousand year period, and declined rapidly in the 9th century as a result of war, drought, exhaustion of agricultural land, and disruption of trade routes. The world also changed dramatically for the Maya people when Spaniards landed in Yucatán in the early 1500s.
The exhibit begins with two works by Guatemalan/Mexican artist Carlos Mérida, Mexican Costume and an untitled Guatemalan landscape. Mérida, born in 1891 in Guatemala of Spanish and K’iche’ Maya heritage, lived in Paris in his twenties where he became acquainted with avant-garde art leaders Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró.

In 1919, Mérida moved to Mexico City and worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera, tasked with helping the famous artist in painting murals. In his early years as an artist, Mérida took a special interest in national identity and Indigenous culture. Mérida produced Mexican Costume [1941], an engagement with traditional costume in his adopted country of Mexico. Mérida’s fields of blue color represent an abstraction of Indigenous Tzeltal Maya costume suggesting the forms of Indigenous garments as simplified geometry.

Next to “Mexican Costume” hangs an untitled landscape image of Guatemala by Mérida that was commissioned by the Guatemalan government and printed in Paris. In later years, Mérida diverged stylistically, favoring abstraction and geometric forms in his artwork.

In 1968, Mérida arrived in San Antonio to paint a mural for HemisFair. His mural contains the Maya Blue color favored by his ancestors. Harriett and I met Mérida two years later when he visited Los Angeles for art shows at B. Lewin Gallery in Beverly Hills. Our interest in his work led us to acquire his “Dances of Mexico” [1941], a portfolio of Mexican Indigenous dancers. The Maya Blue exhibit includes examples of artwork by contemporary Latino/a artists to illustrate the influence of Mayan culture and icons and Maya Blue in their own work.

Processing color by hand is central in the work of Los Angeles-based artist Sandy Rodriguez, whose images are often created in dialogue with the tradition of Mesoamerican codices. Rodriguez is a Chicana artist recognized for her research on Mexican codices and her interdisciplinary artistic execution that explores cultural identity, social memory, and the ongoing impact of colonialism.
Rodriguez’s art is distinguished by its use of historic materials and techniques from Mexico, including site-specifically sourced, hand-processed pigments derived from local earth, plants, and insects. She often paints on amate paper–a traditional Indigenous material produced by a fifth-generation Otomi papermaking family in Puebla, Mexico. Rodriguez’s painting depicts a seated woman collecting morning dew from a cornstalk, an evocation of Indigenous healing practices. The dew was used in mixtures for curing respiratory illness in newborns.

Rolando Briseño’s “Verdeazul” [green/blue] painting centers the importance of Maya Blue color. Briseño does not use pigment in the form of a paint. Instead, he has applied raw, powdered blue and green color to the prepared surface of a dish towel. A native of San Antonio, Briseño has devoted fifty years to creating work that reflects his interest in Mexican-Chicano cultural exchanges and the resilience and identity of Latinos. He often uses food and the table as central motifs, symbolizing family, community, modern culture, and celestial forces.

 

The exhibit also includes a video by Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin. Tossin is deeply interested in alternative narratives found in the built environment. She negotiates the hybridization of cultures and the persistence of difference. Her images of a human jaguar and Maya Blue articles of clothing explore issues of consumerism and the intersections of place, history, and aesthetics.
For artists working today, Maya Blue has become a starting point for thinking about how Indigenous heritage informs their creativity reflecting contemporary issues.

Alongside works of ancestral Maya art, this exhibition presents contemporary work by artists who engage ancient meanings of blue as a context for critical explorations of identity and new ways of framing histories.

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Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo. All images courtesy of the author.