In 2023, Ellen and I realized a dream long deferred: We brought together in Denver many of our dearest curatorial colleagues to consider the ways that American art museums built their collections of ancient American art. People built these collections. Curators, collectors, and directors around the country influenced the choice of objects and their frame.
We are grateful to all the symposium participants for diving into the histories of their collections and expanding our knowledge of the history of this field: Susan E. Bergh, Kristopher Driggers, Ellen Hoobler, Rex Koontz, Mary E. Miller, Joanne Pillsbury, Elizabeth Irene Pope, Michelle Rich, Matthew H. Robb, and Nancy B. Rosoff. In addition to their participation in the symposium, we are grateful to these colleagues for the conversations and insights they shared beyond that weekend. This symposium and subsequent volume bear the imprint of our past mentors who worked in the museum space or considered the impact of the museum space on the development of the field: Diana Fane, Virginia Fields, Julie Jones, Cecelia Klein, Esther Pasztory, and James Oles.
Volumes require many hands and many heads to put together. A special thank you to Paula Michelle Contreras, Curatorial Assistant, Art of the Ancient Americas at the Denver Art Museum, for the extraordinary assistance in pulling together both the symposium and the Mayer Center’s first hybrid digital-print publication. Valerie Hellstein, Managing Editor in Publications and a magnificent editor, kept the project on track and added many astute editorial insights. A big thank you to Matt Popke, the museum’s developer, for his patience and flexibility with this digital publication and his knowledge of digital publications more broadly. I am especially grateful to Lori Iliff, Renée Albiston, and Mac Coyle, Denver’s provenance team, for their help in connecting many dots between collections. Additional thanks to Leslie Murrell for her additional proofreading and to Renée Miller, Manager of Rights and Reproduction, for her invaluable assistance and guidance. The museum’s photographer Christina Jackson performed magic resizing and shooting additional images as necessary, and Tasso Stathopulos designed the print cover and overall look of the publication. We would also like to thank Denver’s audiovisual staff, Dave King and Stephen Tucker, for making the hybrid symposium run so smoothly and for their help in coordinating presentations and questions from our online audience. For their assistance from the Walters Art Museum, thanks are also due to Matthew Affron, Lisa Anderson-Zhu, Kendra Brewer, Anna Clarkson, Elena Dammon, Sarah Dansberger, Angie Elliott, Patricia Lagarde, Julie Lauffenburger, Payton Phillips-Quintanilla, Ani Proser, Rona Razon, Kristen Regina, Edgar Reyes, Ana Salas, Ariel Tabritha, Michael Taylor, Kevin Tervala, René Treviño, Khristaan Villela, and Brynn White.
Thank you to my colleagues in the Latin American department, Jorge Rivas Pérez, Lisbet Barrientos, Raphael Fonseca, and Kathryn Santner, as well as Angelica Daneo, Chief of Curatorial Affairs, Collections, and Exhibitions, and Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director, for their support. Finally, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Jan Mayer and her late husband, Frederick, for ensuring that the field of ancient Americas would continue to flourish. Their generosity and unprecedented vision continue to shape the field and the next generation of scholars.