Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: Casta Paintings Exhibition
The powerful large-scale paintings and drawings of Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez allude to minimalism and the pattern and decoration movement while using the aesthetics of Spanish Moorish tiles found on buildings in her native Colombia. The artist also often incorporates lace patterns from colonial portraits, as well as colonial botanical drawings, to explore notions of identity, memory, hybridity, and appropriation.
Friedemann-Sánchez describes her most recent body of work, called Casta Paintings, as part of a “multi-narrative novel about memory, migration, and the pursuit of the American dream.” The series title is taken from a colonial 18th-century painting tradition used to create a system of hierarchical classifications of racial stereotypes that assigned specific names to mixed-race individuals. The goals of such paintings were to warn against racial mixing. Terms such as mestizo, castizo, and mulatto emerged out of this problematic practice.
