Mexico's heart and soul: Art exhibit reflects 3,500 years of culture

A lot can happen in 3,500 years. And few things demonstrate that more clearly than art, because art has been embedded in the heart and soul of every culture known to man.

But it's not often you get an exhibition that showcases that entire span of history. "Las Artes de Mexico," now on display at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, however, does just that.

On loan from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Okla., the show features artifacts and artworks from the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica, including Olmec, Teotihuacan, Mayan, Toltec and Aztec empires, on up through 20th century Mexico.

"The Gilgrease has one of the best collections of Mexican art in the world," UMFA Interim Director Gretchen Dietrich says. "We're very excited to have this exhibition."

Two companion exhibitions are also on display at the museum: "salt 1: Adriana Lara," featuring a contemporary Mexican artist; and "COMMUNITY: eat, work, play," with works by first- and sixth-graders at Lincoln Elementary School.

"Las Arts de Mexico" is "one of the most comprehensive, most amazing exhibitions," says Jill Dawsey, curator at UMFA. It provides insights into ancient and modern culture and religion, and examines "the rich historical roots that have developed into the country's cultural landscape today."

The earliest artifacts reveal a "culture of ceremony, warfare and veneration for the dead," she says. One of her favorite items is a jade necklace that is "just exquisite." It truly makes you appreciate the skill of those early craftsmen, she says.

Much of life in ancient Mesoamerica centered on religious beliefs, and artful objects played important roles in those practices — whether it was capturing the power of the jaguar in stone, creating effigies of divine figures or providing offerings to the gods.

"You see everything from animals to music to ballgames and how it was incorporated into religious life," says Dawsey. There are objects from a violent Olmec game, "which was a metaphor for life and death," she says. "There are also wonderful animals, really beautiful and so expressive."

The exhibition carries the religion theme forward into more modern times. After the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s, Roman Catholicism became the official religion of the area, and works such as yarn paintings, colonial bultos and religious retablos show the fusion of Indian and Spanish cultures, Dawsey says.