Exhibition Narrative

Unboxing Early Modern Latin America

Unboxing Early Modern Latin America

Introduction

Boxes are objects which at once extend and contain their makers’ and users’ contact with the world. Then as now, they traveled the globe, moving between cultures and amongst sellers, consumers, and collectors.

With online shopping and shipping, they have proliferated in our world as symbols of consumerism, as fodder for YouTube and TikTok videos, and as useful nuisances, littering our landscapes though they have not occupied the same space in scholarly studies.

Usually an afterthought or even discarded entirely, boxes were often luxury goods themselves, made by skilled craftspersons with significant care and attention to detail. Boxes contain, store, hide, protect, wrap, package, and encase, but they can also reveal, expose, manifest, exhibit, and even release.

Here we turn attention to the box as a signifier and site of meaning. This collection features objects from LACMA, the MET, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Ornate wooden box in the shape of a shell with detailed carvings, metal lock, and three small feet shaped like mythical creatures, photographed open on a white background.
Ornate wooden box in the shape of a shell with detailed carvings, metal lock, and three small feet shaped like mythical creatures, photographed on a white background.

This exhibition is divided into two sections: hide and reveal.

Goals

This exhibition aims to lift the lid of what is so often hidden away in the world or “ordinary things” to demonstrate how these objects, in their movement between concealing and revealing, are actually extraordinary.

Octogonal box with ornate mother-of-pearl inlay in an abstract floral pattern framed by tortoiseshell, photographed on a white background and viewed from slightly above.