Quality Time

Abstract

Editorial| December 18 2020 Quality Time Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published on visual culture in early modern South America. She is the author of Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections (University of Texas Press, 2020). She edited A Companion to Early Modern Lima (Brill, 2019) and coedited Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches (Getty Publications, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2020) 2 (4): 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.4 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Emily A. Engel; Quality Time. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 18 December 2020; 2 (4): 4–13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.4 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search Sometimes time moves like that, not straight but sideways, backward even, and like the owls, in silence, in broad and looping arcs.—Ben Ehrenreich1 The quality of time in Latin American and Latinx visual cultural expression became an ongoing fascination of mine as I researched and analyzed the history of South American political portraiture.2 When we consider artworks from their negotiated perspectives in time, the idea of the art object as whole, static, complete, and finished becomes fragmented. The renowned art historian of colonial Latin America George Kubler published The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (Yale University Press, 1962) as a temporal assessment of cultural production observed through the lens of continuity and rupture. My initial thoughts on the subject of time as related to the art of historical Latin America were originally inspired by my rereading of Kubler’s work—in particular, The Shape of... You do not currently have access to this content.