Saints & Santos

• Witness how saintly devotions, carried from Rome to Mexico, evolved across the vast territories of New Spain, adapting to local cultures and artistic traditions.
• Discover over 60 breathtaking paintings, sculptures, and engravings that were instrumental in propagating, celebrating, and venerating saintly figures.
• Marvel at the unique materials and techniques used in sacred art, from portraits of saints fashioned from colorful feathers to sculptures made from corn stalks, reflecting the numinous quality of local resources.
• Accompanies an exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art July 20, 2024 – January 12, 2025

Explore how sacred art evolved in early Mexico, adapting to local cultures and artistic traditions.

This beautifully illustrated book reveals the importance of saints in New Spain, a viceroyalty that was part of the Spanish Empire from 1521–1821, covering modern-day Mexico, Central America, and the US Southwest. In the late sixteenth century, Rome’s attempts to manage sanctity as an official process had a profound impact throughout Spain and the Spanish viceroyalties. Saintly devotions traveled to Mexico, and circulated within the vast territory as images or print, then to be transformed by New Spain’s own communities.

Drawing on collections from Mexico and the United States, this book examines the role of images in the construction of the holy: these paintings, sculptures, and engravings routinely used to propagate, celebrate, and venerate saintly figures, and used in official beatification and canonization proceedings. The relationship between sanctity and the pictorial is a long, revered tradition that continues in the work of New Mexico’s santero artists today.

Cristina Cruz González is an art historian, curator, and educator. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago and is a specialist in the visual culture of Latin America. She is an Associate Professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University.