Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas

Artist and activist Judy Baca argues that: Muralism is a work made in relatedness. Related to the people that surround it; related to the place it is in and made in a public voice. Mural paintings made either in twentieth-century Los Angeles or in eighth-century Guatemala are works that are often time-, place-, and community-specific. A medium whose life can be brief, the ties between murals and the time, place, and communities make their ephemerality all the more poignant.The last thirty years of archaeological research have uncovered extraordinary mural paintings throughout the Americas. Advances in technical, material, and art historical research have provoked reassessments of long-known painted walls. This symposium seeks to generate interdisciplinary and inter-regional dialogue on the meanings and functions of mural paintings from diverse chronological, geographic, and cultural settings. The papers presented in this panel move beyond formal and iconographic descriptions to address the ways in which context matters in the production of meaning and how archaeological inquiry might open new vistas on murals as temporally, spatially, and socially related works.