Contemporary Casta Portraiture

the long version

"In her 'casta' portraiture, Delilah Montoya documents and creates art from the ethnic roots of contemporary families living in New Mexico and Texas in this thought-provoking collection. Featuring sixteen present-day photographic group portraits, along with a DNA study for each clan, Montoya mimics and revitalizes the Spanish colonial depiction of the complex racial mixing of the people of New Spain in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. Typically presented as a group of sixteen portraits, the 'casta' paintings illustrated the social hierarchy of the times, with the 'pure blood' Spaniards most privileged while the indigenous, African and mixed-race populations were less favored. Inspired by these paintings, Montoya captures her subjects at home among their material objects, furnishings and even pets. But instead of using eighteenth-century terminology, she represents their ethno-racial composition by juxtaposing her photos with DNA graphs that show the global points of origin of their ancestral migrations. In doing so, Montoya graphically and photographically manifests cultural and biological forms of hybridity in order to understand the impact of race and class on social, economic and aesthetic choices in the United States today" -- Back cover.