by Harsha Gautam
The Fall 2022 undergraduate class of Introduction to the Study of Religion taught by Dr. Mallory Matsumoto had an enriching out-of-class learning experience a week before Thanksgiving when they took a trip to the Blanton Museum with Dr. Matsumoto and their Teaching Assistants, L. Nelson Leonard and Harsha Gautam, both of whom are Ph.D. students at the Department of Religious Studies.
The focus of the class trip was the special exhibition on Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America, organized by Dr. Rosario I. Granados, the Marilynn Thoma Associate Curator of Art of the Spanish Americas. The aim of this trip was to understand the use, meaning, and social roles of garments and, more importantly, their representations in various media in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With tour guides from the museum officials, the class learned how to contextualize the paintings on display in their socio-historical locations and reflect together on how garments were experienced in civil and religious spaces.
The usual classroom discussions that are an integral part of this class of inquisitive thinkers invited the paintings on display to participate and invoke inquiry into themes of colonialism, racism, religious conversion, social hierarchization and other important issues that have been recurrent topics of discussions throughout this course. With the professional guidance of the museum officials, the class absorbed the skill of investigating paintings with all their elements, such as the size, colors, content and patrons to discern the meanings conveyed and the social contexts displayed. The class was able to use this information and knowledge to prepare for their reading-journal assignment that combines class discussions with weekly readings to add to the continuous and comprehensive learning experience that this course offers.
About the Author:
Harsha Gautam is a Ph.D. student in the Religions in History track at the Department of Religious Studies at UT Austin. She specializes in the study of premodern South Asia, early Buddhism, Sanskrit and Pāli literature and South Asian Art. Her research interests also include religious identity formation, power relations, comparison and intellectual history.
