Arts of the Ancient Americas

The works in these galleries represent more than six thousand years of visual imagination, cultural meaning, and history. Created in what is mainly Latin America and the Caribbean before 1600 CE, they were commissioned by powerful leaders—kings, queens, and other figures who used art as essential markers of identity, means of belonging, and conduits to the divine.

The names of the artists remain mostly unknown to us—signatures were rare in the Americas before European colonization in the sixteenth century—but their works speak to their achievements in a broad range of media. Many of these artists lived in what were some of the world’s largest cities at the time, under the sponsorship of formidable states and empires. Their creations served, and continue to serve, as bearers of sophisticated knowledge, from complex writing systems to pioneering metalworking technologies.

The ideas and narratives presented in these spaces draw from the transformative scholarship of multiple disciplines—including archaeology, art history, and the study of ancient inscriptions—and from historical and contemporary Indigenous traditions. Here, you will find gold ornaments that catch the sun’s power, stone trees supporting the sky, water materialized in greenstone, and ceramic objects designed for eternal life. These items reveal the connections between regions and the ways in which people and ideas moved and thrived throughout history.