Professor, Art History
Ray Hernández-Durán, originally from San Antonio, Texas, completed his M.A. in Art of Africa and 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. As Professor of Spanish Colonial Art and Architecture at UNM, his courses mainly cover Ibero-American Colonial Art, Spanish Art, and Baroque Art, as well as nineteenth-century Mexican Art, Chicano/Latinx Art, African Art, 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 Publications:
The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History: Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Routledge, 2017); “Havana, Body and Soul: From Urban Theory to Social Practice, and Back Again,” Cuban Studies (2023); “’Nombres dignos de memoria’: Writing the History of Mexican Art in the Nineteenth Century,” Revista de História da Arte e Arqueologia (2019); “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); “Más allá de la visión: Contemplando a la Virgen de los Dolores en la Ciudad de México del siglo diecisiete (o, asi a una somaestética colonial),” En torno al documento (2014); 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).
Forthcoming Projects:
‘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 (2024); “’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); Routledge Companion to Latinx Art (co-editing, projected 2026); and X Marks the Spot: Gen X, Latinx, and Higher Education (co-editing, cfp forthcoming).
Select Awards:
Title VI FLAS for Portuguese (Brazil), 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, Andy Warhol Foundation Fulcrum Grant, and Andrew J. Mellon grant.
Museum/Curatorial Work:
Huntington Art Gallery, UT Austin; Student Union Building Art Galleries, UW Madison; Chazen Museum of Art (formerly, Elvehjem Museum of Art), UW Madison; the 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; Sanitary Tortilla Factory Art Space, Albuquerque; and National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum, Albuquerque.