At the Crosshairs of Empire: Weight and Ephemerality in an Eighteenth-Century Peruvian Powder Horn

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Abstract:

This essay analyzes a late eighteenth-century powder horn housed at the Autry Museum of the American West collected by Charles Lummis during his 1892 expedition to Peru with Adolph Bandelier. By considering the object’s weight, shape, size, and iconography, which produce delicate interplays between heft and weightlessness, bodily violence and pleasure, we can understand the complexities of colonial Latin American material culture of warfare during a critical period of inter-imperial rivalries. While these objects were ubiquitous in the North American context during the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, far fewer examples exist from the Spanish Americas, thus underscoring the superlative status of the Autry powder horn. This essay also situates this object within a broader stylistic continuum of vernacular material culture produced and used by soldiers across the Americas, betraying the vastness of its origins.

Biography:
Ananda Cohen-Aponte is Associate Professor of History of Art at Cornell University who specializes in the visual culture of pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America. Her research centers on issues of racial formation, cross-cultural exchange, historicity, and coloniality in the visual and material culture of the Andes. She is author of Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes (University of Texas Press, 2016). Cohen-Aponte served as editor and primary author of the book Pintura colonial cusqueña: el esplendor del arte en los Andes/Paintings of Colonial Cusco: Artistic Splendor in the Andes, published by Haynanka Ediciones in 2015. Her new book project, Insurgent Imaginaries: The Art of Rebellion in the Colonial Andes, considers the role of visual culture in both quotidian and spectacular acts of resistance within the context of anti-colonial uprisings of the late eighteenth century. She was a Getty Scholar for the 2024-2025 academic year.