May 4, 2025

May 4, 2025

We are rusty at the travel business. I figure we need a trial adventure before heading overseas. We take advantage of tomorrow’s Cinco de Mayo festival and visit the Tucson Museum of Art. It was never on my radar until I saw a snippet two months ago when taking my visiting sister to a craft fair on the property. I was pleasantly surprised to see a large collection of Mesoamerican art. What is an unknown Tucson museum doing with a collection like this? Apparently it was donated by a wealthy patron more than fifty years ago.

The large exhibit has an array of artifacts from Aztec, Olmec, and Mayan pre-Columbian civilizations. You can learn a lot about a culture from its art. One piece showing a royal being carried in a Sedan Chair indicates a stratified social hierarchy. There were also many warrior statues. I recently read a book that commented that most ancient civilizations were slave cultures and the practice persisted worldwide until just a few hundred years ago. One of the main goals of war was not to kill your enemy but steal their property and enslave them. Male slaves did the drudge agricultural chores. Females produced more slaves.

Other artifacts illustrated they had the same desires as us. They made beautiful art, played music, had pet dogs and participated in ball sports. Some of the pieces look primitive and stylized and show the stereotypical ceremonial costumes, but others are just everyday realistic. Oddly many of the human representations are on circular-handled urns and drinking vessels. It is all of a more diverse and higher quality than I expected.

I was happy to see a cup decorated with Mayan hieroglyphs reminding me of the Dresden Codex we saw last Fall in Germany. Hopefully this is just a preview of what we can expect to see if we ever make it to Mexico City to visit their National Museum.

We ran through the rest of the art museum. It is mostly contained in a confusing circular ramp reminding me of the Guggenheim in NYC. It is an eclectic collection of many styles, some nice and unique, but some just weird. They have a special exhibit called Divergence of Legacy. It is mostly a Woke statement complaining that cowboys unfairly dominate Western Art and that Indians, Mexicans, blacks, and women are being culturally "erased".