Professor, Art History
Ray Hernández-Durán completed his M.A. in the Art of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his Ph.D. in Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Latin American Art at The University of Chicago. He is currently Professor of Spanish Colonial Art and Architecture in the Department of Art at UNM and is affiliated with Latin American Studies, Chicana/Chicano Studies, Africana Studies, and Museum Studies. Central to his research and teaching has been a critical exploration of historiography, colonialism, institutional histories and practices, and the political nature of knowledge production.
Select Courses:
-ARTH 340/540: Baroque Art and Architecture [lower division]
-ARTH 350/550: Introduction to Ibero-American Colonial Art [lower division]
-ARTH 449/549: Arts of Spain, 1500–1850 [upper division]
-ARTH 454/554: Arts of 19th Century Mexico [upper division]
-ARTH 455/555: Art of New Spain during the Hapsburg Period (1521–1700) [upper division]
-ARTH 456/556: Art of New Spain during the Bourbon Period (1700–1821) [upper division]
-ARTH 580: Colonial Art Historiography [graduate seminar]
-ARTH 580: Text and Image in Spanish Colonial Art [graduate seminar]
-ARTH/MSST 585: Museum Studies [graduate seminar]
-ARTH 592: Space, Land, and Landscape in the Early Modern Americas [graduate seminar]
Select Publications:
“’La muerte de la pintura en México’: The Death of Mexican Painting and the Birth of the Mexican School of Art at the Academy of San Carlos,” Art Academies: Europe and the Americas, c. 1600–1900 (forthcoming); “’El origen del arte entre nosotros’: Colonial Religious Painting and the Formation of a (New) Mexican Canon,” Saints and Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain (2024); “’Nombres dignos de memoria’: Writing the History of Mexican Art in the Nineteenth Century,” Revista de História da Arte e Arqueologia (2019); The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History: Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Routledge, 2017); “Politics, Society, and Art in the Age of Bourbon Reform: Placing the Portrait in Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” San Antonio 1718: Art from Viceregal Mexico (2018); “Aztec Art after the Conquest and in Museums Abroad” Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs (2016); and “The Language of Line in Late Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The Calligraphic Equestrian Portrait of Viceroy, Bernardo de Gálvez (1796),” Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910 (2013).
Select Awards:
Title VI FLAS for Portuguese, Title VI FLAS for Yorùbá, Fulbright Hays Group Projects Abroad (Nigeria), Fulbright Hays Dissertation Fellowship (Mexico), John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Gale Memorial Award, Andy Warhol Foundation Fulcrum Grant, New Mexico Humanities Council Award, and Andrew J. Mellon grant.
Select Museum/Curatorial Experience:
Huntington Art Gallery, UT Austin; Student Union Building Art Galleries, UW Madison; Elvehjem Museum of Art, UW Madison; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; The Art Institute of Chicago; University of New Mexico Art Museum; Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Santa Fe; Albuquerque Museum; and National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum, Albuquerque.