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Image Not Available for Casta 2, from the series Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”
Casta 2, from the series Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”
Image Not Available for Casta 2, from the series Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”

Casta 2, from the series Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”

Primary (Fort Worth, Texas, 1955–Houston, Texas, present)
Date2015
MediumTest Tubes, Wood, Sand, Metal Etching and Dye Sublimation Photograph
Dimensions35 3/4 x 38 in.
Credit LineBlanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gilberto Cárdenas Collection, Museum Acquisition Fund, 2022.34
Collection AreaLatino Art
Object number2022.34
On View
Not on view
Label Text
This portrait series by Delilah Montoya is a revision of eighteenth-century casta paintings, a genre of art used in the Spanish American colonies to visually define persons of mixed ancestries within a hierarchy of artificial racial categories. Montoya’s complex casta project combines several components, including images of ethnically diverse families shown in domestic settings, and a website which includes the results of the families’ genetic research and audio commentary by those portrayed. Montoya supplements her portraits, framed as curio boxes, with ancestral migration maps and vials filled with sand to visualize each family’s biogeographic heritage. Her ethnographic investigation reveals that the diversity embedded in our genetic histories undermine the validity of modern definitions of race.