Guided tour by a faculty member of the exhibition 'Shadows on Stone', which brings John McAndrew's photographs of 16th-century Mexican monasteries to life with 3D printing and projections.
The Blanton Museum of Art is hosting a public tour of Shadows on Stone on Sunday, November 8, led by a museum educator. The exhibition itself opened on October 10 and runs through January 31, 2027, so this is one of the guided walks you can catch while it's still up.
Shadows on Stone is built around the archive of architectural historian John McAndrew, with more than 60 photographs of monasteries built in central Mexico toward the end of the 16th century. McAndrew's whole point is how these buildings pulled from completely different traditions at once: Gothic rib vaults, classical Renaissance facades, Moorish ornamentation, and Indigenous stone masonry. He describes the result as "the most dramatic American architectural innovation before the skyscraper," and the photos let you see those styles sitting side by side in the same walls.
The show doesn't just stick to flat images, either. It brings in 3D printing and projections to give you a better sense of the churches' actual dimensions and how they fit into the landscape around them. It's part of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin, curated by Rosario I. Granados and Marilynn Thoma, who is the Curator of Art of the Spanish Americas.
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If you've never spent much time with colonial Mexican architecture, the tour is a good way to get your bearings—you'll have a docent walking you through the photographs and explaining the different styles McAndrew is pointing out. The exhibition stays at the Blanton through January 31, so if you can't make the tour on November 8, you've still got plenty of time to see it on your own.
