In their heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, museum catalogs of permanent collections of art from the ancient Americas fulfilled an indispensable role recording the appearances, whereabouts, and growing knowledge of objects in a then-nascent field. At the same time, they frequently aspired to portray a newly amassed collection as “encyclopedic” and posit its significance. Such catalogs—for example, Lee Parson’s Pre-Columbian Art: The Morton D. May and The Saint Louis Art Museum Collections, published in 1980—regularly commemorated major acquisitions from private collections and, as things of beauty themselves, were typically gifted to potential donors to solicit future acquisitions.

Today, some may consider permanent collection catalogs less relevant or even obsolete. In contrast to exhibition catalogs, which record artworks united temporarily to explore a specific topic, collection catalogs document an assemblage that is both ongoing and idiosyncratically composed. A single book typically cannot publish an entire museum’s holdings in an area; and as collections continue growing, such volumes quickly become outdated. Especially amid pandemic budget and staff reductions, many museums have prioritized online content, whether publishing digital catalogs or disseminating knowledge through an online database. In the latter, many more photographs can be offered, and information can be continually updated without the space constraints or associated costs of the printed page. As museums change, the nature and role of permanent collection catalogs are changing too. This volume, The Art of the Ancient Americas at the Dallas Museum of Art, not only demonstrates the viability of the genre but—through the careful hand of editor Michelle Rich, the Ellen and Harry S. Parker III associate curator of Indigenous American art—it also signals the genre’s necessity to scholarship.

Rich begins with an introduction to the history of collection, listing key acquisitions over the years. The overview will be useful to scholars interested in how the collection grew—although I was curious to learn more about why it grew, guided by what principles or ambitions, especially in different time periods. Subsequently, there are sections devoted to Native American art, Mesoamerica, the Isthmo-Colombian region, and the Andes. Each begins with a cultural overview and a map aimed at general audiences. These are followed by one or two essays demonstrating how the collection has catalyzed new research, most notably, David Stuart’s exegesis of the depiction of royal Maya women in stone carvings from the sites of Pomoná and La Corona, and Ann Rowe’s identification of a previously undocumented style of Andean tunic. The book’s essays are largely written for scholarly audiences, especially one discussing laboratory testing of Mesoamerican artifacts carved from green stones by Brigitte Kovacevich, Dawn Crawford, Matthew Carl, Maximiliano A. Burgess, and Marcus L. Young. The sections also present selections of objects from each region discussed either individually or jointly in short, accessible texts written by Rich and other authors. This range of authorial voices and complexities of the texts allows the catalog to function on a number of different levels.

For those who have always appreciated collection catalogs, this volume will not disappoint. It is, in my opinion, one of the most beautifully produced examples in this field in years. The photographs of the objects are luminous—and Brad Flowers, the museum’s head photographer, should be commended. With digital editing, it is too easy to zhuzh away the cracks, creases, or accretions inherent to archaeological artifacts. It can also be tempting to minimize areas of outdated conservation. Instead, these photographs allow viewers to visually discern the objects’ life histories, while drawing attention to their material qualities. Photographs of Maya eccentric flints show the knapped sculptures dramatically backlit against a black background highlighting the translucent edges of the dark stones (2, 138, 139, 141). A “Wingate Black-on-Red” jar made by an Ancestral Puebloan ceramist pops with brilliant vermillion (36). And, a detailed photograph of a Late Horizon Andean tunic visualizes the eccentric wefts coursing in different directions through the cloth (240). The book designers, Jeff Wincapaw and Ryan Polich, employ these images to great advantage, for example, positioning an iconic Wari panel as the book’s endpapers so that the division between the blue and yellow macaw feathers aligns with the gutter.

But beyond the book’s excellent scholarship and stunning form, one of its greatest contributions is how it indexes changing institutional mores, values, and even tensions in stewarding a hemispheric collection of Indigenous American art in the twenty-first century. These are issues critical to curators’ work in this moment that future scholars will undoubtedly seek to better understand. The volume suggests the critical role that permanent collection catalogs could play in documenting future shifts in curatorial and museological practices. For example, an entire section of the book is notably dedicated to the Isthmo-Colombian region. Previously referred to by some scholars as “the Intermediate Area,” this former moniker gives a sense of how the region has long been regarded (and really disregarded) between the two geographic pillars of the “Pre-Columbian” field: Mesoamerica and the Andes. In an earlier era, highlights from this region might have simply been tacked onto another chapter; and, notably, the Dumbarton Oaks catalog of this part of their collection only appeared twenty-five years after the initial Andean volumes. By pointedly bringing the artistic traditions of this area into focus and giving them their due, the catalog erodes the old-fashioned notion of an encyclopedic museum where there is a fixed number of boxes to check. There will always be more cultural and artistic traditions to learn about and feature.

So too, recognizing that the majority of ancient American artifacts in art museums in the United States were unearthed through undocumented or unpublished circumstances, wherever possible, the authors of the catalog work diligently to incorporate discussions of provenience (or the place where an artifact was found). In some cases, this knowledge is specific, for example, the description of how a Maya effigy vessel was originally located in twenty-three fragments within the acropolis of Quiriguá, in Guatemala, in 1912 (143). In other instances, the information is more speculative, such as a statement that a Mixtec censer was “purportedly discovered in the mid-1960s in a cave near Teotitlán del Valle in the Tlacolulua Valley” (122). For objects where such information is not currently available, the catalog may spur and direct future research. Stuart’s essay beautifully demonstrates the fruits of such labor with regard to the panel from La Corona. As Stuart recounts, in the 1960s, “small, elegantly carved limestone blocks” began appearing on the international art market that were “seemingly related, but looted from ruins then unknown to archaeologists” (73). Stuart and a team of scholars first visited La Corona in 1997 and identified it as the likely source of the sculptures. His essay even includes a photograph of the rock that Dallas’s panel was crudely sawn from, discovered in 2012 by Jocelyne Ponce Stokvis (73). This dedicated attention to provenience makes a case for why, in a future catalog, a greater discussion of provenance (or the ownership history of an object) might be merited. While the volume’s introduction and the individual credit lines shed light on whom the museum acquired objects from, it would be interesting to learn more of the objects’ life histories after they were unearthed and before they entered the collection. What were their global peregrinations and how did they get to Texas? As Rich rightly observes, “it is instructive to recognize that all objects . . . have life histories, just like humans. Researching an object reveals those histories and traces its story” (17-18).

The catalog also evidences the concerted efforts museums are making to forge connections between collections of ancient and contemporary Native American art. Karen Miller Nearburg’s essay draws on interviews with artists Marvin Martinez (San Ildefonso), Frances Martinez (Santa Clara), Al Qöyawayma (Hopi), and Diego Romero (Cochiti), whose works are in the collection. As such, the title of the book is a misnomer; this is not exclusively ancient art. And, in actuality, art from the 1400s or 1500s is not really ancient either. Using “ancient” as a euphemism for “Pre-Hispanic” or the outdated “Pre-Columbian” is not always helpful, especially if what is really meant is “Indigenous.” As a field, we might focus less on the supposed cut-off imposed by colonialism and—as this text helpfully emphasizes—pay more attention to the continuums. Doing so creates important space for first-person discussions of artistic practice and the significance of artmaking within families, communities, and societies. The resulting text is the most accessible essay in the catalog, which will have the benefit of communicating the importance of this approach to broad audiences; but it is also the essay that is most disconnected from the selection of objects that follow it. For me, this raises two correlated questions: If curatorial practices developed within Native American art represent the leading edge of curatorial practices in art museums more broadly—as the legacy of Amy Lonetree’s Decolonizing Museums, published in 2012, might suggest—will there come a day when “Pre-Columbian” art is more regularly considered and exhibited on a timeline with works of contemporary Latin American art? Second, if or when this happens, what will become of scholarly studies of ancient Latin American art within museums? Will they be supplanted or can they coexist alongside contemporary multivocality and community engagement? Perhaps, ideally, they can be enriched by them.

Finally, the catalog records the changing attentions to certain kinds of objects in the present moment. For example, Mimbres bowls from southwestern New Mexico are one of the most-studied and oft-published types of Native American artifacts, but the majority are believed to have come from burials where they likely would have been placed over the face of the deceased. Rich and former curatorial assistant Alyssa Wood briefly write that “because of their culturally sensitive nature, no Mimbres vessels are included in this catalogue” (22). The publication documents one institutional response to this evolving issue. At the same time, future scholars might not have the benefit of understanding other practices that leave more evanescent records. At the time of the catalog’s publication, images of the Mimbres vessels in the collection still appear on the Dallas Museum of Art’s online database. And, notably, Mimbres vessels still remain on view in multiple museums, especially in the southwest. In a field undergoing such rapid transformations on multiple fronts, excellent permanent collection catalogs—like this one—will play significant roles in documenting shifting institutional approaches and in shaping the future of curatorial practice.