(In)visibility: The Black Body, Narratives of Identity, and the Biombos of Juan Correa

The question of the presence and active participation of artists of African descent is an obscure one in the art history of Mexico. We know that Black hands were vital participants in the arts of the Americas, and their contributions to Spanish American art were innumerable, but the full extent of this contribution remains frustratingly unclear. Relatively little scholarly research has focused on the Black artists of the colonial world; the most famous are the rare exceptions, including Juan Correa of Mexico (1646–1716). Even in this instance, however, misinformation and confusion abound. A distinguished painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Correa was of a mixed-race family and was himself Afro-Mexican. The son of a physician from Cádiz, Spain and a free Black woman, Pascuala de Santoyo, Correa became one of the most prolific painters of his day with upwards of four hundred works identifiably of his oeuvre. He executed a number of works for the cathedral in Mexico City, while others were sent half a world away to Spain. The Correa family was one of the most active families of painters in colonial Mexico City, and his nephew Nicolás Correa was also a mixed-race artist of note. Yet, only recently has Correa’s Black heritage publicly marked his identity. While not overtly hidden from modern viewers, the assertion and emphasis of Correa’s status as Afro-Mexican is relatively new. This is the result of a long history of racial erasure(s), slippage, public disinterest, and modern narratives of Mexicanidad that began in the colonial period. Already a maestro pintor when the painters’ guild in Mexico City instituted new policies in the late seventeenth century designed to prevent artists of othered racial categories from achieving the highest levels of success, Correa stands out as an artist of Black heritage in Mexico who renders the African history of the Americas visible through his own personhood, but who participates in the invisibility of that African-ness in the visual canon. This article therefore proposes to begin from Juan Correa and cast a wide net to examine the invisibility of the Black artist in Mexico and the visibilities of race and rhetorical bodies in New Spain as the larger Viceregal territory.