Andrew Finegold

Andrew Finegold is an art historian specializing in the visual and material culture of the ancient Americas. He is particularly interested in the phenomenology and metaphysics of art objects, and these considerations have informed his publications on a variety of topics, cultures, and time periods. His book Vital Voids (University of Texas Press, 2021) examines the real and symbolic values ascribed to holes, cavities, and voids across a variety of media in Mesoamerica. A portion of this research was published as an article titled "Vitality Materialized: On the Piercing and Adornment of the Body in Mesoamerica" in the journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. His article “Objects without Texts: Mimbres Painted Bowls and the Problematics of Interpretation,” which was published in the journal Art History in 2019, proposes a phenomenological approach towards Mimbres imagery, which is considered as being inseparable from its ceramic ground. He is also co-editor, with Ellen Hoobler, of the volume Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) to which he contributed an essay titled “Atlatls and the Metaphysics of Violence in Central Mexico.”

He is currently in the early stages of work on a book project on Temporalities of Mesoamerican Art, which will argue that, contrary to the Modernist notion that sees artworks as singular and autonomous, Indigenous artworks were conceived and experienced within a worldview based on relationality and transformation, and therefore require an analytical shift away from the concept of Being to that of Becoming. The implications of this will be examined from the vantage of three different moments in the lives of objects: their creation within specific contexts, their viewing as an experience that unfolds within time, and their appropriation within new and changed circumstances. The second chapter will expand upon ideas first introduced in his dissertation, which investigated the brief and anomalous appearance of narrative battle imagery in Epiclassic Mesoamerica and the temporalities of viewership this novel pictorial format engendered. A further, long-standing interest in modern and contemporary engagements with—and representations of—Pre-Columbian art and culture is reflected in his website, Ancient Americas, Appropriated, which includes essays on individual examples by a variety of contributors and a database cataloging over 1,800 examples of pop-culture and artistic references to the ancient Americas from around the world.

Courses Taught:

(note: The sample syllabi provided here may include links to readings and course materials that can only be accessed by individuals with UIC credentials.)

Undergraduate Courses

AH 110 World History of Art & the Built Environment, Part I [syllabus]

AH 172 Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas

AH 273 Visual Culture of the Ancient Andes

AH 274 Visual Culture of Mesoamerica [syllabus]

AH 301 Theory and Methods of Art History

HON 127 The Calendar Stone (and Other Aztec Monuments) [syllabus]

Mixed Undergraduate/Graduate Seminars

AH 404 Semiotics, Structuralism, Poststructuralism

AH 470 Art & Architecture of the Ancient Maya

AH 470 Classic Mimbres Ceramics and the Ancient Southwest

AH 470 Mesoamerican Codices

AH 470 Coatlicue

Graduate Seminars

AH 511 Towards New Histories of the Visual Arts, 1960 to the Present [syllabus]

AH 562 Pre-Columbian/(Post-)Modern [syllabus]

AH 570 The Afterlife of Ancient American Art

Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture, University of Texas Press, 2021. [Table of Contents]

“Vitality Materialized: On the Piercing and Adornment of the Body in Mesoamerica.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1.4 (2019): 55–75. [PDF]

“Objects without Texts: Mimbres Painted Bowls and the Problematics of Interpretation.” Art History 42.2 (2019): 216–241. [PDF]

“Atlatls and the Metaphysics of Violence in Central Mexico.” In Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler, pp. 223–236. University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. [PDF]

Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives (co-edited with Ellen Hoobler), University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. [Table of Contents] [Online Addenda]

PhD, Columbia University
MA, Columbia University
BA, University of Houston