After 5 years of living in Merida I am opening a gallery in my front sala with a small exhibition showing the visual commonalities between archaic Chinese motifs and those of Mayan art. I have been looking at archaic and early Chinese art for most of my life, from the time I was first exposed to it when I was at Harvard and saw the Grenville Winthrop collection in the Fogg Art Museum. It was not a subject I pursued for study, at the time I was most captivated by the art of the ancient classical world, Greece and Rome and ancient Egypt. Later when I was dealing in antiquities, it was the art of Classical Antiquity that I handled. But early Chinese art is something I have always looked at and sought out on my visits to museums here and abroad.
In the last two decades, I began to see very fine examples of Archaic Chinese jades on the market at prices that seemed like bargains, as well as early Chinese Buddhist sculpture. I started buying a few jades and then also some early Chinese Buddhist sculpture as the people who came into my gallery responded to them. It was also becoming more difficult to source or afford the level of Greek and Roman sculpture that I wanted to handle. Over the past decade before I moved to Merida, I had bought and sold a number of fine jades and Buddhist sculptures.
I moved to Merida in fall of 2019, and moved into my house in January 2020. I had in my mudanza a part of my collection, without a clear idea of what I would do with them. But the idea of having a gallery exhibiting them was in my mind and was a factor in choosing the house I did buy as it has a large front room suitable for exhibiting sculpture. However the pandemic took the wind out of my sails and I became somewhat detached from my own collection. I feel now I am coming back into my own self again, and this exhibition is part of that.
My interest in ancient art is catholic with a small c, wide ranging and inclusive. I find the art of different cultures and times to be fascinating in that they illustrate the many different solutions different peoples came to problems or issues common to us all. In the case of the Mexo-American world, some of those ideas are quite alien and for some, repulsive. I am speaking here about blood sacrifice which has been part of that belief system since the very beginning and reached its apogee with the Aztecs and their large scale human sacrifice. Attempting to wrap ones mind around such a different view of the world and of life is challenging. I don’t judge, rather I would like to understand what was in the minds of these people who practiced such things.
Art allows us the most direct and unmitigated view into these other alien cultures mind set, even if we don’t fully understand what we are seeing, on some non verbal level it is communicating and it can resonate with us. There is still so much we don’t know about the pre-Columbian world, and while knowledge is expanding and new discoveries are still being made, we are far from having a full picture.
The relationship between early Chinese motifs and the art of the Mayans specifically is something we cannot explain at this point but is very apparent. I present these objects and images simply to provoke thought and illustrate the value of looking at Mayan art in relation to the art of other cultures times and places. If anything, it reaffirms the value and standing of Meso-American art as one of the world's great traditions worthy of being shown with that of the old world and the unexpected similarities we find.
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