“Prints Across the Pacific, 1565–1815/Estampas a través del Pacífico, 1565–1815” | Getty Connecting Art Histories Project 2026–28

Alejandro Julián Andrade Campos is Research Professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Alfonso Vélez Pliego at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP). He completed his master’s and doctoral degrees in Art History at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His research focuses on pictorial production in Puebla during the viceregal era, the lives and practices of painters, artistic traditions, and the political and devotional significance of imagery.
 
Andrade Campos’s research focuses on the development of viceregal painting within the former Bishopric of Puebla. From this perspective, he is interested in analyzing the theoretical and visual tools artists employed to create their works—most notably the use of prints to emulate compositions originating from diverse regions. In particular, he wishes to delve into two accounts linking the Society of Jesus with the global use of prints. First, he will examine the 19th-century chronicles regarding the print shop established by Lorenzo Zendejas (father of the Puebla painter Miguel Jerónimo Zendejas); this venture was encouraged by the Jesuit Juan Antonio de Oviedo, who, while serving as the order’s procurator in Rome, urged Zendejas to purchase such items with the guidance of Jesuit fathers from across the globe, gathered there for the General Congregation. Second, he aims to trace the prints that adorned the walls of the Jesuit Colegio del Espíritu Santo in Puebla. These works are documented in detail in inventories drawn up following the Order’s expulsion, which record not only the subjects depicted but also the names of the artists who signed them. Through this study, Andrade Campos seeks to reconstruct a corpus of images promoted by the Order—images that formed part of the global visual repertoire consumed in Puebla during the first half of the 18th century.

Diego Arenas is Associate Professor of Education at the Escuela de Pedagogía, Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City. He holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame. He specializes in the history of education, literature, and cultural exchange in the early modern Iberian world. His research examines colonial schooling, residential education, literacy, and the intellectual production of non-European students and writers across colonial Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His current projects include a monograph on education and literary culture in the early colonial Iberian world and articles on residential schools, pedagogy, Indigenous intellectual history, and the global circulation of educational texts and prints. He has received support from the Spencer Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the Bibliographical Society of America.

Arenas’s research examines the role of education and literacy in the expansion of the early Iberian world. His current book project focuses on boarding schools for non-European students across Spanish and Portuguese territories between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It compares institutions in Granada, Kongo, New Spain, Peru, Brazil, Goa, the Philippines, Macau, and Japan, among other regions, and asks how schooling contributed to religious conversion, colonial administration, the formation of new intellectual communities, and the creation of non-European intellectual texts. He examines how Indigenous and other non-European students read, translated, copied, printed, adapted, and contested the texts used in their education.

Transpacific print is central to this project. The circulation of books, images, paper, printing technologies, ideas, and scholars connected the Americas, Europe, and Asia in ways that cannot be understood if we limit ourselves to modern national boundaries. He is particularly interested in the movement of catechisms and catechistic forms, cartillas para enseñar a leer, devotional images, grammars, and literary texts between Mexico, Manila, Japan, Macau, and the Iberian Peninsula. The trace of print reveals how educational models were transferred and transformed through translation, local printing practices, Indigenous and Asian languages, and the participation of non-European printers, students, and authors.

Studying transpacific print allows Arenas to reconstruct education as a material and collaborative process. It also helps illuminate how printed objects created unexpected connections among Nahua, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and European intellectual worlds. The broader aim of this research is to show that colonial education and print culture were shaped by both imperial institutions and by the mobility, interpretation, and creative agency of the people who used printed texts.

José Araneda Riquelme is a postdoctoral fellow in the MISGLOB project, “Catholic Missions and the Global Circulation of People and Goods in the Early Modern Period (1500–1800),” at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on communication, agents, and the circulation of media between the Andes and Europe during the seventeenth century. He received his PhD in Early Modern History from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and an MA in History from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is also the co-host and co-producer of the podcast Las cosas tienen vida, together with Kate Mills (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz).

Araneda Riquelme’s research reconstructs the career of Antonio Ricardo (circa 1540–1606), the first printer active in the Viceroyalty of Peru (1581-1606). It examines his work through three connected contexts: his formation in Venice and Lyon, his activity in Mexico City, and his career in Lima. Rather than treating Ricardo solely as a founding figure of Catholic colonial print, the project analyzes the commercial networks, visual models, and technical practices that enabled his press in an age of religious conflict. He focuses on Ricardo’s connections with printers Pedro Ocharte in Mexico and Guillaume Rovillé in Lyon, both persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition, to analyze material continuities between Europe, Mexico, and Peru. Ricardo also traveled to Lima from Acapulco on a ship that likely carried Asian artifacts and goods to the Andes in 1581. A central case is the visual transfer in the woodcuts’ style using these printers’ books. For instance, the portrait in Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado, printed by Ricardo in Lima in 1596, employs techniques and conventions comparable to those in Rovillé’s Lyon editions of the Decameron, especially Pierre Eskrich’s portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio. This study helps trace the new movement of images, models, and artisanal knowledge across Atlantic and Pacific routes.

Javiera Barrientos (Santiago, Chile) is a scholar in Early Modern literature and culture, bibliography, and the broader history of the book, as well as a bookbinder. She is currently completing her PhD in Literatures in English at Rutgers University where she is writing a dissertation entitled Literary Landfills. Transoceanic Histories of Bibliographic Waste in the Early Modern World. Through archival research and literary analysis, her project examines practices of bibliographic discard and paper recycling across European colonial networks. On the intersection of different time periods, geographies and languages, her work traces how colonialism and environmental extractivism have been mutually constitutive in shaping the economical, sociocultural and material ecosystem of the book. As a Graduate Fellow at the Rutgers Initiative for the Book, she manages their bibliographic Teaching Collection, teaches and develops pedagogical material for undergraduate courses, curates exhibitions, and leads workshops on bookmaking and material textuality. In recognition of her scholarship, she received the Bibliographical Society of America‘s D. F. McKenzie New Scholar Award in 2025 and is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow.

Counter to the common belief that in the past books were considered invaluable commodities, early modern literature and material history reveal the resilience of sociocultural practices associated with a book’s disposal. Her research, Literary Landfills, traces the perception of books as waste back to early modern colonial societies to foreground their afterlives as discarded and repurposed objects. This focus illuminates the origins of their current depreciation and reframes the study of books as artifacts of wear and tear in societies shaped by imperial and colonial inequalities. It shows how competing notions of value, use and discard disrupt  totalizing narratives that imagine global Northern metropoles as fully controlling the administration and material resources of their colonies. Pairing representations of unbound, torn, and reused books in early modern literature with material analysis of waste paper, bookbinding structures and paper pulp, this project challenges the reduction of books to tools for interpretation and cultural assimilation.

When research on bibliographic waste has focused on Anglo-European samples, Literary Landfills expands the field to colonial localities like Polynesia and South America incorporating the study of indigenous bark paper within creole bibliographies. This remapping emphasizes bibliographic waste as a relational and moving category which circulates among transoceanic circuits of intellectual and material trade decentering the Atlantic as the primary axis of print circulation and cultural exchange in the period. As an example, the first chapter “Arboreal Politics and Plant Paper in the Pacific,” traces the constituents of paper (linen rags and plants) as ‘useful waste’ in the wake of European Pacific expansion. Turning to John Taylor’s “The Praise of Hemp-Seed” and Thomas More’s Utopia, I track how imperial extraction transformed indigenous plant resources into repurposed bibliographical materials. This shift, characterized by Polynesian barkcloth sample books circulating in late eighteenth century France, destabilized European representational systems for understanding textual waste residues.

Originally from Puebla, Mexico, Juan Manuel Blanco Sosa holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) and Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) and the Universitat de Barcelona, respectively. Since 2011, he has served as a researcher at the National Museum of History (Chapultepec Castle) in Mexico City. His scholarly work focuses on Mexican numismatics, printmaking, and the religious heritage of colonial Mexico.

Blanco Sosa’s research focuses on the study of illustrations and engravings in books published in Puebla between 1765 and 1821. On the one hand, he examines the uses, intentions, and meanings attributed to images in books and popular printed materials; on the other, he explores the formal and artistic solutions employed by engravers in woodcuts and copperplate engravings as part of the visual language developed in the region. Finally, his work considers the engravers themselves: their relationships with printing presses and workshop practices, the commissions they received and the patrons who employed them, as well as recent historiographical research on their lives and careers.

As part of Prints across the Pacific, Blanco Sosa seeks to place these Puebla engravings within a broader context, situating them as part of the networks through which images circulated and were traded between kingdoms. In this way, studying across the Pacific can shed new light on these and other topics within a circuit that extends from the Philippines to Italy, allowing us to appreciate the convergence of different artistic traditions brought to printmaking.

Antonio De Caro (PhDs, Hong Kong Baptist University) is Assistant Curator at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, focusing on Southeast Asian collections, and Honorary Associate in the Department of History, SOAS, University of London. His research centers on the visual and material culture of Catholic missions in East and Southeast Asia, and the cross-cultural circulation of devotional imagery between Europe and China in the early modern period. He was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Zürich and Resident Fellow at the Albuquerque Foundation. Earlier positions include postdoctoral fellowships at Masaryk University and the University of Turin and visiting fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Hong Kong. His work sits at the intersection of global art history, the history of Christianity in China, and the visual culture of early modern Catholic missions.

De Caro’s current research project examines images depicting the death of St. Francis Xavier, S.J. (1506–1552) on the island of Shangchuan, in present-day Guangdong province, China, at the borders of the Ming empire. Following the translation of the Saint’s body from Shangchuan to Goa, India, where it remains preserved, images of Xavier, including his vera effigies, circulated widely from Goa to Rome. After Xavier’s canonization in 1622 and the subsequent translation of the Saint’s right arm to the Chiesa del Gesù in Rome, Rome and Goa became even more central cultic centers, leaving Shangchuan, it would seem, in a comparatively marginal role. At the same time, images depicting Xavier’s death celebrated his fama sanctitatis and his buona morte (good death), casting Shangchuan as the ideal site where Xavier “earned” his sainthood. Devotional practice played a key role in the circulation of this iconography across Europe: from Rome to Lisbon, from Venice to Ljubljana, prints depicting Xavier’s death were also believed to carry miraculous, thaumaturgic power. These images traveled beyond Goa and Rome, eventually reaching the Chinese empire, where they were reframed within a different religious and artistic context. De Caro’s project traces the circulation of these images across the margins of various geographical regions, attending to the intricate web of interactions among the different actors who shaped the imagining of Xavier’s death.

Gamalinda’s research focuses on the history of the three active Philippine presses of the early modern period through the study of graphic art elements like brevigraphs, capital letters and coats of arms. By treating these visual elements as material and historical evidence rather than just decorative features, I aim to reconstruct of aspects of the printing industry that are difficult to trace through documentary sources alone. Through an analysis of recurring designs used by local printers and engravers of the Philippines, imported from East Asia, Latin America and Europe, I have identified patterns and irregularities that prompt a reconsideration of previous claims about colonial-era publishing in the Philippines.

These smaller graphic components of printed books, which are often-overlooked, offer insights into workshop practices, production networks, and the book circulation. I am also reconstructing aspects of printing operations in the Jesuit press in Manila by comparing inventories of printing-office assets with evidence gathered from graphic art elements. I have used this approach to reassess claims regarding commercial connections between Philippine and Mexican printing industries.

As part of Prints Across the Pacific, Gamalinda’s research will expand to include materials from across Pacific. In this new phase, she hopes to articulate the similarities and distinctiveness of the local graphic style in comparison to its counterparts in Rome, Spain, and Mexico. At the same time, Gamalinda will investigate the processes involved in importing printing components used in Philippine presses from Mexico.

Xiaolu Li holds a Ph.D. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, China, and currently serves as Assistant Professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. She has extensive overseas research experience, including appointments as Foreign Researcher at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Rikkyo University, Japan; Visiting Scholar at Silpakorn University, Thailand; and an upcoming Visiting Research Fellow at the Third World Studies Center, University of the Philippines Diliman. Her research interests cover diasporic Chinese art, transpacific and Iberian colonial art, Southeast Asian art history, and the transcultural history of art and knowledge circulation. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph The Metamorphoses of Adam and Eve: A Transcultural Art History of the “Couples and Customs” Ethnographic Schema (2027), which examines the global transcultural circulation and adaptive transformation of early modern European print schemas across East and Southeast Asian maritime networks.

Li’s research examines the bidirectional circulation of printed images and artistic knowledge across the early modern Pacific, centering the creative agency of artisans in transcultural visual exchanges. It comprises two interconnected research strands. The first is fully elaborated in her forthcoming monograph The Metamorphoses of Adam and Eve: A Transcultural Art History of “Couples and Customs” Ethnographic Schema (2027), which traces the dissemination of the Renaissance-originated “Couples and Customs” ethnographic print schema from the 16th to the 19th century across global maritime trade networks. Its opening chapter focuses on the late-sixteenth-century Boxer Codex, analyzing how Manila’s Chinese artisans creatively refashioned European and Chinese print conventions to visualize indigenous populations for Spanish colonial audiences. Comparing Japanese Nanban biombo, Siamese murals, and Qing tribute albums, this study demonstrates early modern prints as flexible transregional media negotiating colonial, mercantile, and religious dynamics, with localized East Asian adaptations later flowing back to Europe as Chinoiserie.

The second strand of her research is her ongoing project on diasporic Chinese painters in Southeast Asia (16th–19th centuries). It reconstructs their workshop lineages, guild structures, and adaptive visual strategies under diverse colonial, religious, and royal patronage, as well as their crucial practice as botanical illustrators for European naturalists. Drawing largely on southern Chinese local gazettes, genealogies, and indigenous archival materials, this study challenges the dominant one-way “Western commission, Eastern production” narrative and reveals reciprocal, multi-layered artistic exchange. Overall, Li’s research on transpacific print culture prioritizes the transcultural, transcontextual, and transmedial mobility of visual images.

Silva Rocha is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS) at Seikei University, Tokyo, and holds a PhD in Architectural History from the University of Tokyo. His research examines the Iberian presence in East Asia (16th–19th centuries), with a particular focus on architecture, visual culture, and the circulation of knowledge across Europe and Asia. He has published articles and book chapters in architectural history, Japanese studies, and Sinology and has received the Mori Prize in Asian Studies (ASPAC/AAS) and the Fundação Oriente–Ambassador João de Deus Ramos Prize (Portugal). Silva Rocha has held visiting appointments and fellowships at leading research institutions in Asia, including the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica (Taipei) and the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Fudan University (Shanghai).

His research examines how visual, architectural, and printed knowledge circulated across the Pacific world between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, with particular attention to the interactions linking Iberia, East Asia, and the Americas. As an architectural historian, he investigates how images, maps, illustrated books, folding screens, and missionary publications functioned not only as artistic objects but also as vehicles for transmitting cultural, spatial, and intellectual knowledge across linguistic and political boundaries. His current work combines architectural history, visual culture, and digital humanities to reconstruct networks of exchange across the Pacific regions.

Silva Rocha’s interest in transpacific print stems from the recognition that printed and pictorial materials shaped how distant societies were imagined, interpreted, and represented. Rather than treating prints merely as illustrations, he views these objects as historical evidence embedded in broader processes of circulation, adaptation, and cultural translation.

Sales is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Translation Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He received his PhD from Monash University in Translation Studies, following an MA in Spanish Pedagogy from the University of Valladolid and a BA from the University of the Philippines. He has translated several books into Filipino, and has been a postdoctoral fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan and the Postdoctoral Fellow in Missionary Linguistics at the Center for the Historiography of Linguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

Sales is currently working on a monograph with the provisional title of Migrant Texts, Multilingual Lives: Cultures of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. I am specifically keen to revisit translation as a metaphor for the production and circulation of colonial texts within the Spanish Philippines and the wider Spanish Pacific. My idea is that in addition to the usual conceptualization of translation as a mere transfer of signifiers between languages, a more critical view of translation as the circulation, fixing, and policing of knowledges through language can be deployed for analyzing for a wider array of translational processes that contributed to the formation of an early Hispanofilipino literary polysystem.    

Kathryn Santner earned her PhD in the history of art from St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, in 2016. From 2022-2024 Mayer Center fellow at the Denver Art Museum, curating the exhibition Painting in the Andes, 1680-1780. She is now Assistant Curator at the Denver Art Museum.

Though a curator of Latin American art, Santner’s interest in the Philippines and transpacific exchange spans more than a decade. Her initial research focused on Manila’s lay religious institutions for women (beaterios) and the objects used to enhance their religious experience.  That project was supported by the Leverhulme Trust, John Carter Brown Library, and Newberry Library. My graduate work on devotional objects brought me to my recent research on sangley silversmiths who supplied liturgical silver to churches and convents across the Philippine archipelago. A book chapter on these plateros appears in Transpacific Crossings: Art, Trade, and the Manila Galleon, co-edited with Karina Corrigan and Jorge Rivas-Pérez (Denver Art Museum, 2026).  

Santner is particularly interested in the “reverse flow” of art objects from Latin America into the Philippines, including sarga paintings, liturgical silver, sculpture, and imprints and engravings. For years, the study of the transpacific has positioned Asia as a source of inspiration for Latin American decorative arts; her aim is to examine other avenues of exchange between Iberia, the Americas, and the Pacific world through the eminently mobile nature of print.  Doing so will not only enhance our presentation of Denver’s collection but also support future research and exhibition projects.

Maryluna Santos-Giraldo is a PhD Candidate at Tulane University. She holds an M.A. in Art History with Distinction from University College London, where her dissertation The Pan-optic Legacies of the Nation: An Approach to the National Museum of Colombia explored architecture and display as tools for shaping national narratives. She also earned an M.A. in Art History from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá), with a thesis on the historiography of the Latin American Mudéjar, and a B.A. in History with a minor in Pedagogy from Universidad Católica Argentina (Buenos Aires). At Tulane, she has built an interdisciplinary trajectory that bridges art and architectural history, material science, and preservation studies. Alongside coursework in early modern architecture and Latin American visual culture, she has pursued classes in environmental sciences and completed a Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation.

Santos Giraldo’s dissertation explores the architecture of the New Kingdom of Granada (roughly present-day Colombia) between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Traditionally regarded as a peripheral territory, her research repositions the region as a center for the production of new building practices. Among these, she examines the environmental adaptations and formal transformations of early modern architectural treatises as they were reinterpreted in local contexts. Shaped by the collective expertise of builders, these innovations have often been overlooked by traditional scholarship, which has tended to subsume local variations under the broad labels of “Colonial” and “Mudéjar.” Her work reconsiders these labels by revealing how builders, materials, practices of making, and the circulation of architectural knowledge generated locally specific architectural traditions that were simultaneously embedded in broader global exchanges. She brings some of these questions to the study of not only the New Kingdom of Granada, but also to understand the more extensive connections within the Spanish Empire that were possible due to the overseas mobility of prints and people.

As part of Prints across the Pacific, she is interested in how both the territories of Nueva Granada and the Philippines received Sebastian Serlio’s architectural ideas via print, and constructed local variations of them, in response to El Niño variations. These conditions influenced the ways in which brick structures were originally protected from humidity and continue to pose challenges for their preservation today.  In the long term, her goal is to contribute to a fuller understanding of how the so-called peripheries of the Spanish Empire were not marginal, but instead, dynamic sites of architectural knowledge production in constant transoceanic dialogue.