Category: Spain

Postcard from Zaragoza, Spain: Vowing to map out street-art stalking

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Above: “No al Maltrato Animal,” #savethechicken

There are pockets in Zaragoza full of street art, but somehow our meandering paths this past spring did not stumble across many of them. The city’s efforts to turn abandoned buildings into artists’ canvases through its Festival Asalto can be found here, a website I wish I’d tracked down while there.

So this post combines a few of our snapshots of art seen on the streets with artistic commercial signs and will remind me to do a minimal amount of research before striking out on long urban walks on future trips.

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Caste discrimination woven into Spanish Colonial art of the Americas

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Above: “Virgin of the Tailors,” Cusco, Peru, circa 1750, on loan from Museo Pedro de Osma, Lima

Late-colonial New Spain was awash with conflicting energies: American-born Spaniards (Creoles), like their North American counterparts, felt a growing desire for independence, yet needed their identification with Europe to cement their sense of superiority over the racialized indigenous, African, and mixed-race lower classes….”

“Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Body,” Christa Olson, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Fall 2009

And 18th-century fashion statements as recorded in paintings and sculpture became a tool to exhibit the claimed superiority of those with pure, or at least high, percentages of Spanish blood flowing through their veins. On display at the Blanton Museum of Art through January 8, Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America focuses on the societal role of textiles in conveying class distinctions.

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Postcard from Zaragoza, Spain: Seductive scallops and marisquerias

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Above: Zamburinas at Marisqueria Tony

Faithful making the long Camino de Santiago pilgrimage crossing from France through Spain, perhaps a 500-mile hike, wanted to return with a souvenir as proof of the arduous journey afoot. A shell found commonly on the Galician coast just beyond the route’s destination of Santiago de Compostela became that evidence, a variegated or calico sea scallop, zamburina.

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