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MASKS OF THE AMERICAS Throckmorton Fine Art is delighted to announce, Masks of the Americas, its first exhibition of the new year. This exhibition features masks from various countries and cultures of Mesoamerica dating from the earliest known civilizations through to the Spanish Colonial period. Encompassing a wide variety of mediums: stone, ceramic, wood, and jade, the exhibition is designed to surprise and educate in its scope. On a purely physical level, masks may seem to hide the real faces of their wearers, substituting artificial faces drawn from the tradition and from the cultural imaginations of the mask-makers. However, the act of covering the face is far more profound than simple disguise, for the face itself has a far greater significance from mere physiognomy. The face in Pre-Hispanic cultures was a marker for that which most intimately characterized the intrinsic nature of each individual. All meanings were connected to their cultural manifestations of spirituality. These spiritual concepts survive to this day among the present day Indigenous peoples of Latin America. Transformation between human and spirit selves was a dominant theme in traditional Mesoamerican thought and remains so to this day. The exhibition will feature masks from the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mezcala, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya and Aztec. A collection of devil masks from Guerrero will be exhibited for the first time and a group of Colonial era dance masks in wood will be shown. Also on view will be vintage photographs of masks from the 1920’s by Edward Weston, images by Tina Modotti, Hector Garcia and Mariana Yamplosky prints from the 1960’s.
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