The Female Terracotta Sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art: Pastiche or Fake?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Large-scale female terracotta sculptures were extensively produced in the Mixtequilla region of Veracruz during the Late Classic period. It is likely that numbers of these sculptures were looted and smuggled into the United States prior to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property. This paper focuses the female terracotta sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), which shows the characteristics of large-scale female terracotta sculptures from the Mixtequilla region. The authors examined the sculpture under natural and ultraviolet light, considering its aesthetics, visible restorations, and fragments, and conducted provenance research. The investigation also included an interview with Brígido Lara, the restorer at the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, because the possibility of the NCMA sculpture being one of his creations had arisen. This presentation revisits and recalls Lara’s forgeries of sculptures from Veracruz.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32586