The Meadows Museum at SMU in Dallas has long been a stalwart champion of Peninsular Spanish art, but it is smartly expanding its geographical gaze. Opening on August 23, 2026, Spectacles of Power and Faith: Colonial South American Art from the Thoma Foundation promises a visually rich dive into a complicated, syncretic history.
The exhibition will bring together 63 rare, often never-before-seen paintings drawn from the collection of Dallas arts patrons Carl and Marilynn Thoma. Produced between 1600 and 1850, these canvases and finely rendered copper miniatures originate from across present-day Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador.
What makes this period so continually compelling is the sheer visual collision of cultures. The works undeniably project the political muscle of the Spanish Empire and the sprawling reach of the Catholic Church. Yet, the paint itself reveals the vital, experimental creativity of the Indigenous American, European, and African artists working in early modern South America.
Co-curators Adam Jasienski and Verónica Muñoz-Nájar have organized the 63 works into thematic sections—ranging from “American Virgins” to “Daily Life at Home (The Salón)”—to unpack the complex theological and secular roles these images played in colonial society. In a welcome move to contextualize these objects, the museum is also staging an immersive chapel installation. Enhanced with music and scent, the space aims to recreate the multisensory environments for which many of these devotional works were originally intended.
After closing in Dallas on January 24, 2027, the show will pack up and travel to the Princeton University Art Museum and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. Accompanied by a hefty 300-page bilingual catalogue featuring emerging scholars, this exhibition looks to be a serious, necessary step in pulling early modern South American painting out of the historical margins and into the spotlight.