The Invention of Casta Painting: Race and Science in the Age of Enlightenment

Ilona Katzew is Department Head and Curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her exhibitions include New World Orders; Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century Mexico; Contemporary Projects 9: Gajin Fujita and Pablo Vargas Lugo; and Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. Painted in Mexico, 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici was selected by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times among the top exhibitions of 2017 and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. Katzew has received Fulbright, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Foundation, Getty, and John Carter Brown Library fellowships, and is the author and editor of various volumes, including Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico; Joaquín Antonio de Basarás: Una codificación del México del siglo de las luces; and Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America, coedited with Susan Deans-Smith. In 2018 Artsy featured her among the top 20 international curators taking a cutting-edge approach to art history.