NMSU art museum digitizes country's largest collection of Mexican retablos

Mar. 1—To the excitement of scholars across North America, the largest public collection of Mexican retablos in the U.S., at New Mexico State University's Art Museum, is going digital.

The university's art museum hopes to have high-resolution images of its more than 2,000 pieces of Catholic devotional art online by the end of the summer, museum Collections Curator Courtney Uldrich said. The collection includes both retablos, which depict saints, and ex-votos, which depict and show appreciation for miracles performed by saints.

"There are one thousand different things that can be studied through these objects," said Emmanuel Ortega, now an assistant professor of art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois.

The museum has wanted to digitize its collection for some time but did not have the staff to do so until the university created Uldrich's position in the summer of 2022, she said.

The university began amassing retablos back in the early 1970s, when a handful of donors handed over their individual collections, Uldrich said. The museum collection has continued to grow since.

While the practice of creating retablos continues today, most pieces in the museum's collection date back to the mid- to- late-1800s, when retablos became "everyday objects" in Mexico, Ortega said.

Before Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, laws restricted people from the lower class, particularly Indigenous peoples, from making religious art; following Mexican independence, the art form exploded "uncontrollably," Ortega said. People would buy retablos from largely anonymous artists, bring them home and pass them down generations, he said.

Retablos are often seen in parts of New Mexico and are a popular art form for many in the state.

Ortega became fascinated by the tradition of making retablos and ex-votos in part because they "show you the history of discrimination against non-elite members of society," he said.

"They're objects that inform not only 300 years of oppression in relation to the crafting of religious images in Mexico ... they give you a sense of the resilience of these forms of art that continue today," he said.

Digitizing NMSU's collection of retablos could open a range of research possibilities beyond art historical research, Uldrich said.

For example, she said, parts of a 2022 exhibition at the university curated by Ortega used ex-votos to explore cultural attitudes toward women and historical medicinal practices, which were described in ex-votos that provided thanks for healing from various ailments.

Uldrich hopes that long term, the art museum can develop an online "research hub" on retablos.

"It's not a wide field right now, but it's such an interesting field," she said.