2026 Eleanor Tufts Award, Society for Iberian Global Art, College Art Association

An examination of sculpture and authorship in eighteenth-century Quito that documents Caspicara as a participant in the innovative artistic production of the city’s workshops and its widespread commerce of polychrome sculptures.

Who is Caspicara? Nothing is known of Caspicara’s life, and not a single sculpture has been documented as his work. Yet traditional histories laud him as a prolific Indigenous sculptor in eighteenth-century Quito who created exquisite polychrome figures and became a national artistic icon. Drawing on extensive archival, historical, and object research, Susan Verdi Webster peels away layers of historiographical fabrication to reveal what we do and do not know about Caspicara and his work.

Rather than being a solitary master, Caspicara collaborated with other, largely Indigenous artists in Quito’s protoindustrial workshops, manufacturing sculptures now credited to him alone. The high quality of Quito sculptures produced by anonymous artists turned the city into a hub of wide-ranging commerce in religious icons. The art world and post-independence Ecuadorians have lionized the one named sculptor, Caspicara, according to the Western model of the artist-genius, amplifying the market for works bearing his name and creating a national hero on par with European masters. Lost in this process were the artists themselves. Webster returns to their world, detailing their methods and labor and, for the first time, documenting a sculpture made by Caspicara.

A study of domestic religious sculptures in Quito.

During the eighteenth century, the colonial capital of Quito established itself as a prolific producer of wooden polychrome sculpture. With large glass eyes, smooth shiny surfaces, and minute attention to detail, the sculptures possessed an artistic refinement that enchanted contemporaries. While these objects depicted Christian sacred personages, they were not always sequestered in churches and shrines. They filled domestic spaces, becoming signifiers not only of holiness but also of a distinctive Quitenian culture.

Devotional sculpture was, on its face, an aesthetic reifiction of the colonial project, commissioned by creole elites. However, drawing on published accounts and archival evidence, including wills and dowries, Leslie Todd shows that sculpture was diffused across society, contributing to a complex localized identity. As makers, viewers, and owners of sculpture, Quiteños of Indigenous and mixed heritage and varying socioeconomic backgrounds took active roles in creating the city’s visual culture. In doing so, Todd argues, they simultaneously underscored and challenged colonial class and power systems, investing a European form with styles that revealed and reinforced specifically Spanish American subjectivity.

What did it mean to be a woman in colonial Spanish America? Given the many advances in women's rights since the nineteenth century, we might assume that colonial women had few rights and were fully subordinated to male authority in the family and in society—but we'd be wrong. In this provocative study, Kimberly Gauderman undermines the long-accepted patriarchal model of colonial society by uncovering the active participation of indigenous, mestiza, and Spanish women of all social classes in many aspects of civil life in seventeenth-century Quito.

Gauderman draws on records of criminal and civil proceedings, notarial records, and city council records to reveal women's use of legal and extra-legal means to achieve personal and economic goals; their often successful attempts to confront men's physical violence, adultery, lack of financial support, and broken promises of marriage; women's control over property; and their participation in the local, interregional, and international economies. This research clearly demonstrates that authority in colonial society was less hierarchical and more decentralized than the patriarchal model suggests, which gave women substantial control over economic and social resources.