We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art

Mesoamerican artists held a cosmic responsibility: as they adorned the surfaces of buildings, clay vessels, textiles, bark-paper pages, and sculptures with color, they (quite literally) made the world. 

The power of color emerged from the materiality of its pigments, the skilled hands that crafted it, and the communities whose knowledge imbued it with meaning. Color mapped the very order of the cosmos, of time and space. By engineering and deploying color, artists wielded the power of cosmic creation in their hands. 

We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. Histories of colonialism and industrialization in the “color-averse” West have minimized the deep significance of color in the Indigenous Americas. 

This exhibition follows two interconnected lines of inquiry—technical and material analyses, and Indigenous conceptions of art and image—to reach the full richness of color at the core of Mesoamerican worldviews.​

Credit: Overview from museum website

Image credit: Alfonso Nava Larios, Cosmic Tree (Guamuchil), 2023, © Alfonso Nava Larios, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA, by Javier Hinojosa​​​