Silver designers, maestros, and artisans who worked in metals, stone, enamel, and wood established the handwrought industry that became the Mexican silver renaissance in Taxco, Mexico (1930–1970). William Spratling, Héctor Aguilar, the Castillo brothers, Margot van Voorhies, and Salvador Terán founded the initial workshops. These centers of creativity and innovation brought opportunity and community to hundreds of craftsmen. For the designer-artists, traditional Mesoamerican art provoked imaginative interpretations through the lens of contemporary artistic trends. Their artwork resonated with a larger national narrative that was expressive of a collective identity, forged on the ideal of a shared common tradition. The Latin American Library is the foremost repository in the world to study this extraordinary moment in Mexican artistic production, built over the last twenty years. Thanks to generous donors, the library houses original correspondence, business documents, design drawings, printed ephemera, and representative pieces of silver jewelry by the designers of Taxco.
The silver designs based on Mixtec gold jewelry or Aztec codices and sculptural reliefs, like the Los Castillo feathered serpent, Spratling’s double jaguar, or Héctor Aguilar’s tongues of the sun, are defined by the power of line and abstract form. These necklaces and bracelets are expressive of a unique ethnic and national identity, but the appeal of this artistic expression is universal and continues into the present.
Spratling’s first exposure to Indigenous Mexican iconography occurred during the years he taught at Tulane University through his friendship with director Blom and other archaeologists at the Department of Middle American Research, present-day Middle American Research Institute. The Spratling collections at the Latin American Library bring the exhibit full-circle, pointing back to the early decades and the founding of the Middle American Research Institute in the 1920s, as a process of constant renewal and growth.