Andrew Finegold
School of Art and Art History | Art History
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Andrew Finegold
Andrew Finegold is an art historian specializing in the visual and material culture of the ancient Americas. He is particularly interested in the phenomenology and metaphysics of art objects, and these considerations have informed his publications on a variety of topics, cultures, and time periods. His book Vital Voids (University of Texas Press, 2021) examines the real and symbolic values ascribed to holes, cavities, and voids across a variety of media in Mesoamerica. A portion of this research was published as an article titled “Vitality Materialized: On the Piercing and Adornment of the Body in Mesoamerica” in the journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. His article “Objects without Texts: Mimbres Painted Bowls and the Problematics of Interpretation,” which was published in the journal Art History in 2019, proposes a phenomenological approach towards Mimbres imagery, which is considered as being inseparable from its ceramic ground. He is also co-editor, with Ellen Hoobler, of the volume Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) to which he contributed an essay titled “Atlatls and the Metaphysics of Violence in Central Mexico.” He is currently in the early stages of a book project on Temporalities of Mesoamerican Art, which will examine the the different ways objects and images were conceived and experienced in relation to time from the vantage of three different moments in the lives of objects: their creation within specific contexts, their viewing as an experience that unfolds within time, and their appropriation within new and changed circumstances. The second chapter will expand upon ideas first introduced in his dissertation, which investigated the brief and anomalous appearance of narrative battle imagery in Epiclassic Mesoamerica and the temporalities of viewership this novel pictorial format engendered.
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Andrew Finegold
A further, long-standing interest in modern and contemporary engagements with — and representations of — Pre-Columbian art and culture is reflected in his website, Ancient Americas, Appropriated, which is currently being redeveloped on the Omeka platform to facilitate the searching of a database cataloging over 1,500 examples of pop-culture references to the ancient Americas from around the world.
Vital Voids Heading link
Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture
University of Texas Press
Art historian Andrew Finegold explores the meanings attributed to this and other holes in Mesoamerican material culture, arguing that such spaces were broadly understood as conduits of vital forces and material abundance, prerequisites for the emergence of life.