‘Shadows on Stone: Portraits of Colonial Mexican Architecture’ opens on October 10, 2026. The exhibition is presented in the Paper Vault on the second floor of the Michener Building.
The show focuses on monasteries built in central Mexico at the end of the 16th century, highlighting their synthesis of Gothic rib vaults, Renaissance facades, Moorish ornamentation and Indigenous stone-masonry techniques. The buildings are described in the exhibition material, citing architectural historian John McAndrew, as “the most dramatic American architectural innovation before the skyscraper.”
The exhibition draws on McAndrew’s photographic archive, held as part of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin. Its display is designed to convey the churches’ dimensions and connection to the surrounding landscape through archival materials, while asking visitors to consider photography as both a work of art and a document. Rosario I. Granados curated the exhibition.
Photography was central to McAndrew’s research on sixteenth-century Mexican architecture, and his images belonged to a wider lineage of Mexican and US architectural photographers drawn to the sculptural and formal power of buildings at the heart of the colonial project.
A featured example is John McAndrew’s ‘Epazoyucan,’ made circa 1941–1945 as a gelatin silver contact print. The related program ‘Art with an Expert: Photography and the Modern Imagination of Colonial Mexico’ addresses how photography of colonial buildings informed debates about the character of modern Mexican architecture.
