Anna Blume

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor of the History of Art at Fashion Institute of Technology

In the cloud forests of west central Guatemala down the slope of the Volcán de Pecul the Maya for thousands of years have grown herbs, spices, fruit trees, corn, and several other kinds of vegetables. Their carefully tended relationship with the forest abruptly changed with mass cleanings for the planting of coffee in the mid-19th century. This shi...

Photographing bannerstones can reveal their shapes, surfaces, and conditions and can also engage both photographer and viewer in a meaningful relationship to these complex carved stones. In the fall of 2016 and spring of 2017, I selected and photographed 61 of 472 bannerstones in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) collection. I chose the...

Spiders creatively built structures in their shifting environments. Cyclosa spiders make compositions in their webs using fragments of plants and other animals they attach to their woven threads. These compositions range from geometric shapes to sculpted images of large spiders with colors and patterns resembling their own bodies. And though the Cy...

NSCRIBED IN STONE on the Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copan is a description of Ruler 13, Waxaklahun Ub'aah K'awil, dying on 3 May AD 738 with k'a'ay u-?-sak-ik', "his breath expired in I war" (Stuart 2005, 385). After this evocation of the ruler's last breath, the inscription continues as a poetic lament in the form of a triplet: mi-'temple', mi-'alta...

INTRODUCTION: The fifteenth-century arrival of Europeans along the coast and eventually inland into the American continents is mostly known to us through the writings of Europeans. This essay begins by recounting the story of one extraordinary Spaniard, Bartolomé de las Casas, an early colonist turned radical advocate of the Indians. Our sources ar...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1997. Bibliography: leaves [143]-149. Photocopy.