Director for the Program of the Art of the Ancient Americas Lacma

In 2010, Diana Magaloni—at present LACMA's Deputy Director, Program Director & Dr. Virginia Fields Curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas, and Suzanne D. Booth and David G. Booth Conservation Middle Director—joined the museum every bit Programme Director of the Art of the Ancient Americas, afterwards serving every bit director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in United mexican states City. During her tenure at LACMA, she has curated several exhibitions and steered the rapid growth of the museum's holdings of ancient American art. Earlier this year, she as well became Manager of Conservation. I sabbatum down with Dr. Magaloni to talk about her path to LACMA and where she hopes her newest position will atomic number 82.

Can you tell me about your career and what led you to become an expert in conservation?

I started studying conservation in Mexico Metropolis, at the School of Conservation of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which was founded in the 1960s by UNESCO. Information technology was a very complete course over five years. In the summers, I led teams of fellow students managing conservation projects all over the land, and I had my first experiences working on pre-Columbian mural paintings. So I spent a year in Switzerland focusing on technical and scientific analysis of works of art. I came dorsum to United mexican states City and applied that analysis to investigate the way pre-Columbian landscape paintings were made, including the artists' observation of nature and how they transformed nature with a purpose, which is cultural in every case. Just the material very clearly affects all of the outcomes; there is a set of limits dictated by the scientific discipline of the cloth. I honey that contrast—the tension between what an artist imagines and the means information technology is achieved. That's why I turned to fine art history, to explore artistic expression and intention and try to reconstruct it from a cloth science perspective.

You're known for your enquiry on the Florentine Codex. What was your item involvement in that document?

I began studying the Florentine Codex when I was getting my PhD in art history at Yale. It's a 12-book encyclopedia containing two,868 paintings, written past Indigenous peoples together with a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún. It was saved from the Inquisition by Ferdinando de Medici, who brought it to Florence, which is why it's called the Florentine Codex. I studied it as a work of art. My methodology viewed it as an art object, and how you lot could reconstruct the context of its production through the textile evidence. And that really fabricated my career; it was best-selling as a major contribution.

Arhuacos Mamo Camilo and Jaison Perez at the Piedras Donama, with Diana Magaloni and creative managing director of digital media Agnes Stauber, photograph © Museum Associates/LACMA

How did you transition to working in museums?

I became the director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, mainly because of my feel as a restorer and researcher. I had been a university professor, but I had never worked in a museum. I realized how much I loved existence in a museum environment. I beloved teaching and inquiry, and you tin have all of that in a museum. Y'all're also connected to a larger audience, so the ideas can really touch people.

What led you to bring together LACMA?

I met Michael Govan when he came to the Museo during my first year as managing director, and we had this amazing conversation and became friends. Later we collaborated on Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico that inaugurated the Resnick Pavilion in 2010, and nearly of those pieces came from the Museo. We also collaborated very closely on some other exhibition, Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico (2012).

Michael offered me the position in 2010. LACMA had just acquired very important collections of Maya and ancient Colombian fine art through the tardily curator Dr. Virginia Fields, which put LACMA on stiff footing within the museum world to recall about aboriginal American art differently. With unprecedented back up from The Andrew West. Mellon Foundation, the museum had the resource to kickoff a program to think of ancient American art as the work of the ancient Indigenous Americas—something that unites the continent. I decided that LACMA was a better home for me, because I could abound more here. It's exciting to plough a new page.

Diana Magaloni (correct) with Arhuacos Mamo Camilo (left) and Jaison Perez (center) at an offering ritual on El Morro, Santa Marta, Colombia, photograph © Museum Associates/LACMA

Where have you taken the Fine art of the Ancient Americas program since then?

I'm very proud of our program. We are looking at such of import connections between objects, identities, communities of noesis, and the museum. It's not only about the collection and its history, only really virtually how that affects the future of the Indigenous peoples of the continent who are connected to information technology. Nosotros curate all of our exhibitions collaboratively with Ethnic people, cultural leaders, or countries of origin. We're working right at present with Postdoctoral Fellow Gordon Ambrosino and the cultural leaders from the tribes of the four corners region on the subject area of landscape and identity in the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. We are also helping to build a cultural center in Katanzama, Republic of colombia, where the Indigenous Arhuaco want to reflect on ways to promote culture and Indigenous knowledge.

I recall our plan is at the forefront of this field. When we need to cooperate with Indigenous people, we find support for it, because of this openness and willingness to acknowledge the responsibility of beingness a museum that shapes cultural concepts. That's a central part of Michael'southward leadership, and because of that I retrieve LACMA tin can be at the forefront of anything.

You recently became Managing director of Conservation. Are you excited to return, in a sense, to where you started?

Absolutely. I started in conservation, and my career is turning to conservation once again, but now with a method to really unite curatorial work and conservation in a stronger style.

Is conservation already closely integrated in working with ancient American art?

Of form, because the methodology is to analyze objects through their materials. When you lot're a historian or an fine art historian, you lot have to take documents, facts that y'all tin apply to reconstruct a history. For art of the ancient Americas, the objects themselves are the documents. So, for instance, ancient Mesoamericans had a very sophisticated alkali metal chemistry. Everything is lime and lime-related, and you can explore that and relate it to their cosmovision, giving united states perspectives on culture that tin provide new contexts to the objects.

Diana Magaloni (heart, left) and Gregory Grinnell (center, right) with members of the Arhuaco community at Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Republic of colombia, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

What are you lot most excited about looking forward?

I want conservators to continue to work closely with curators in the care, study, and understanding of the collection—to tighten that connectedness even more than, and to take projects where nosotros publish together. The Maya vase research project, where we used technologies to see vessels in new means, is a great case. The other matter is scientific discipline and engineering, which have evolved so rapidly. Nanoscience and nanomaterials have changed the manner chemists work and think. Electric current conservation technologies are based on the chemistry of the by, and the new methods are more than precise. Then I would similar LACMA to be at the forefront of the transformation of conservation.

We're as well planning ii big exhibitions. In 2021, we'll present Portable Universe/El Universo en Tus Manos. It's the get-go U.Southward. exhibition of Colombian art, co-curated with Ethnic communities in that location and the Museo del Oro in Bogotá. The other one is called Mixpantli: Rethinking Conquest. The Nahuatl word in the championship ways "banner of clouds." It'southward about the conquest of Mexico from the standpoint of Indigenous communities in the 16th century. With whatever history of conquest, we have this dichotomy of the conquerors and the vanquished, and that is actually not the point of view of the Indigenous communities. Information technology'due south about a creative resilience. And the exhibition will relate that to struggles in the contemporary earth where that kind of beautiful resilience can prevail.

This article was first published in the Autumn 2019 issue of Insider.

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Source: https://unframed.lacma.org/2020/01/28/interview-diana-magaloni

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