Painted Worlds: Color and Culture in Mesoamerican Art

Painted Worlds: Color and Culture in Mesoamerican Art explores the relationships between color, creation, and the cosmos in Mesoamerica, a region comprising most of what is now Mexico and Central America. ​

Indigenous Mesoamerican artists – as creators and keepers of religious, cultural, and cosmological knowledge – had a critical role in shaping their world. By manipulating natural materials, they created richly colored objects that manifest their views of the cosmos, time, and place. Painted Worlds explores the insights behind the colors and materials in Mesoamerican art from its ancient, prehispanic past and how these traditions inform contemporary indigenous artists today.​

Spanning 3,000 years of multisensory artistic practice, Painted Worlds features some 250 objects from collections across Mexico, Europe, and the United States-including the Nelson-Atkins’s own collections. The first exhibition showcasing ancient Mesoamerica in forty years at the Nelson-Atkins, Painted Worlds provides an unprecedented opportunity to experience objects rarely or never seen before in the US, including an extraordinary prehispanic book of divination (the Codex Laud, pictured below), brilliantly colored ceramics, glittering mosaics, sparkling mural fragments from Teotihuacan, and vibrant, intricate textiles. ​

Painted Worlds showcases the technical and cosmological sophistication of Mesoamerican art, as revealed by modern science and in dialogue with historical sources that illuminate the religious functions and cosmic symbolism of color in artistic practices. Color is Life.