In the Hands of Devotees: Indigenous and Black Confraternities and the Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima

An exploration of how Indigenous and Black communities shaped religious imagery and navigated life in colonial Lima.

Colonial Lima was steeped in Christian devotional imagery. While Spaniards set the norms for these works, it was the city’s Black and Indigenous majority that engaged with them most. As members of lay societies of worshippers called confraternities, subalterns were Lima’s key promoters of religious art, surpassing the colonial hierarchy.

Ximena Gómez argues that, by commissio...