On August 10, 1680, the most widespread iconoclastic act of American colonial history occurred in the Rio Grande basin of contemporary New Mexico. Previously autonomous Indigenous communities ancestral to the northern Spanish colony of Nuevo México—the Keres-, Tano-, Tewa-, Tiwa-, and Towa-speaking pueblos, along with those of Pecos, Zuni, and some Hopi—launched a violent uprising. Puebloan warriors targeted Franciscan friars who, for the past century, had overseen each town’s conversion to Catholicism. By day’s end, 21 mission friars had been executed; by week’s end, nearly 500 people—Indigenous, European, and of African descent—had perished. The Revolt resulted in the destruction of nearly all architectural complexes and their artworks created for missionizing purposes, an iconoclastic apocalypse that mirrored anticipatory Franciscan burnings of Indigenous religious objects as well as the physical torture and execution of Native religious leaders. This iconoclastic insurgency was wildly successful: All surviving Spaniards retreated to El Paso and the region was not resettled for more than a decade, in 1692.

While this incredible event has been closely investigated by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and Indigenous scholars of oral history and ancestral memory, it has yet to be framed as a reaction to ineffective visual strategy. My publication, “Missions Impossible: The Art of Franciscan Failure and Puebloan Perseverance in Nuevo México,” will be the first book-length, art-historical analysis of Puebloan religious art, architecture, and their interpretive fields over the longue durée, spanning the 15th to 18th century. My innovative methodology unites the exegesis of ethnohistorical documentation with the scientific analysis of artworks—including wall painting and religious statuary—created by Indigenous artists to resuscitate their inherently variable responses to settler colonization. I argue that within the missions of New Mexico, the creation of Christian art and structures offered avenues for Indigenous artists to exert nuanced forms of agency, which allowed for agile resistance to diverse colonial authorities. Puebloan painters, sculptors, and architects initially co-opted and then reframed European artistic genres, iconographies, and spaces by incorporating techniques of pigment manufacture and architectural design that were cosmologically resonant with their ancestral beliefs, challenging the ideological domination of post-Tridentine Catholicism. In so doing, these artists became provocative and agentic participants in this fraught colonial encounter, despite their outward appearance of religious compliance. In an ironic twist, the production and use of Catholic artworks for purposes of Indigenous catechism ensured the “failure” of the Franciscan endeavor, resulting in the widespread insurgencies witnessed in 1680.

During my time at the Center, I have been able to make substantive progress on this project, thanks to the resources locally available at the National Gallery of Art and in Washington. The collection at the National Gallery of Art Library of early modern books, and specifically illustrated religious texts, was instrumental in identifying visual prototypes for 18th-century devotional images, such as Hide Painting of St. Anthony at the National Museum for American History. I have been able to conduct close visual analysis on this object and two others like it, enabling me to determine their function as processional banners and thus to reconstruct the material armature of Indigenous public devotion in the period of the reconquest. The National Anthropological Archives houses documents composed during the Bureau of American Ethnology’s violently problematic incursions into the Rio Grande region in the late 19th century. With these, I have been able to trace the original provenance and subsequent itinerant biographies of the Smithsonian’s collection of Southwestern material culture. Similarly, the collections of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress provided 19th-century photographic and stereographic images of now-destroyed altarpieces, with which I was able to reconstitute mission furniture. I also analyzed the charred remains from the Revolt itself, excavated in the early 20th century and stewarded by the National Museum of the American Indian. My ongoing work prioritizes community collaboration with museums and Pueblos of New Mexico as descendants and invested stakeholders. My hope is that this allied method of research will yield more informed and ethically oriented modes of publicly accessible scholarship, such a coauthored publications and interpretive exhibitions.

Pennsylvania State University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, 2024–2025

In the coming year, Amara Solari will continue to conduct research for and write this monograph, working with various federal agencies and tribal organizations.