One of the attendees is fascinated. “You are the most important thing in the exhibition, you are the exhibition”, she lets Juan Alejandro Rax Jul know through the translation of a Spanish journalist. He shyly expresses his gratitude.
Juan Alejandro Rax Jul, of Mayan origin, colorfully dressed according to his own tradition, arrives at the Metropolitan Museum (Met) in New York from Santa Cruz Verapaz, with some 32,000 inhabitants, for the first time he has traveled outside his country, Guatemala.
“I am proud to represent my municipality. This has never happened to us. It is something historical that happens to us because one of the largest museums in the world became interested in us. Sometimes people from other countries take an interest in us, while those who live in our region or our governments do not”, she stresses.
He speaks like this after having thanked the audience in his own Poqomchí language, one of the various Mayan languages, during the presentation to the press of the exhibition “The Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Mayan Art” (opens the next day 21). It brings together “a hundred rarely seen masterpieces”, says Max Hollein, director of the institution, at whose entrance two large stone stelae have been installed. Some of these objects were recovered in recent excavations.
Between ancient stones, which explain stories of legends and myths as true stories, the narrative connection with the present is established through a video made for the occasion of a 'Dance of the Macaws'. It is starred by the group of Rax Jul, who directs and promotes this traditional indigenous dance from their city. It is a family matter, since before him his grandmother was in charge and after him his father.
This primary school teacher and native music teacher - of instruments such as the tun kull (percussion), ancient trumpets or shawms -, assures that he has always lived with this dance. "I learned it from the time I knew it, from a young age, with the old people who kept it," he says.
Its presence at the Met responds to the work of Oswaldo Chinchilla, an archaeologist from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University and one of the curators of the exhibition that geographically covers the tropical forests of Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. “Much of what we know about the ancient Mayan religion is based on observations and collaborations with the modern Mayans,” he explains.
That it is not something fossilized, but that it consists of an evolution is demonstrated by that 'Dance of the Macaws', a pre-Hispanic tradition that they maintain in Santa Cruz Verapaz and that Chinchilla discovered on the internet. Rax Jul's group has a Facebook page, where he spreads his ancestral art.
“That dance is based on myths related to creation. It is not identical to what the ancient Mayans did, but it is a representation that has many points in common with scenes that we see on ceramic panels or vessels from the classic period”, specifies the curator.
This dance is one of the things unknown to the general public, in an exhibition that recounts the life of multiple gods, their connection to nature and their relationship with kings and queens, and that includes novelties in the investigation of the Mayan culture. .
Chinchilla starts its journey in front of Stela 25 of the site of Izapa, in Chiapas (Mexico), a very famous monument because it appears as an illustration in many textbooks about the Maya, but rarely seen since it is in a museum in Tapachula that It's been closed for years.
The Met offers the opportunity to contemplate that scene (sculpted between 300 years before Christ and 250 of the current era) that is related to the myths collected in the 'Popol Wuj', a book after the Spanish invasion, from the XVI, in which stories about the creation of the world and the gods are compiled.
In that stela it is told how one of the heroes, of those who were to become the sun and the moon, faced a monster, a huge bird, the so-called 'Seven Macaw'. In the fight, the bird fell due to the impacts of the blowguns, but it ripped off that hero's arm and that is what this work represents, in which a tree-shaped crocodile emerges.
There are interpretations of this imagery, especially that of the vessels or plates (no matter how elegant they may seem, they were for everyday use, unearthed with the remains of tamales) that are due to the contribution of Chinchilla's research work. He says that it has been a difficult process, begun in the 19th century and that in recent decades they have allowed a fairly accurate reading of these symbols.
One of the discoveries is discovering that numerous works of sculpture and ceramics from the classical period (from 150 to 900 AD) have the author's signature, something described as "extraordinary". There are few identifications in the artists of this branch before the 16th century. As if there were a gradation, not all the pieces are initialed.
The commissioner concludes his journey on the board, possibly of funerary significance, in which a very elegant royal woman is staged, holding the figure of a god, in a reflection of the collaboration that existed between them. Next to it, the expert emphasizes, there are two texts in a relevant place that are actually the names of the sculptors K'in Lakam Chahk and Jun Nat Omootz. They are two of the four authors cited in this sample.
“In this exhibition we have given them a special place. As in any other gallery, the museum highlights that it is a work by Rembrandt, Dürer or Picasso, and then comes the title and explanation, with Mayan art we can do the same because we know many of their names” , he remarks.
"The artists were important members of the royal courts, in some cases it seems to us that they have noble titles and for that reason their names were important," he clarifies.
According to Joanne Pillsbury, curator of ancient American art at the Met and lead curator of the show, the names of the artists offer insight into the creative practices and status of the artist. "Some artists were called sages, others were described as instruments of kings and, perhaps most intriguing, some artists' names included names of gods," she clarifies. "This suggests to us that for the Maya, the creative process was, at least in part, a divine process," she adds.
It remains to discern how in Tikal, one of the most powerful Mayan places, no signatures appear and, instead, in Piedras Negras they have discovered numerous. Perhaps it's all a question of who was in charge. "I think there were rulers who were clearly happy to associate with these great artists because their signatures are often close to the description of the king," Pillsbury continues. "Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes not so much, and sometimes front and center, so it's a salient aspect of the artist's role in that place and time," she adds.
And, as a context for what is observed in these rooms, Pillsbury indicates that it must be borne in mind that in the eighth century, in the Mayan region, the buildings of Tikal were taller than the most impressive that were built in Europe in that time and "we have more names of artists from the Mayan territory than from any other place on the planet in that period".
Rax Jul continues to serve the media. He insists on the importance of the work of fighting for the preservation of the history of his people, which was almost annihilated by the Spanish colonization, and on his emotion for the journey that his task has taken him on: “One does not believe it, more I'm all in New York."
