Columbia University in the City of New York

Department of Art History and Archaeology

Lisa Trever

Lisa and Bernard Selz Associate Professor in Pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology

Pre-Columbian and Latin American Art
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2013

Contact Information

Phone: (212) 854-8901
Email:
Office: 912 Schermerhorn Hall
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 4-5 and Wednesdays, 4-5 by appointment
Sign up here: https://calendly.com/lisatrever/office-hours

Biography

Lisa Trever is a specialist in early art history and archaeology of what is now Latin America, with a research focus on the ancient art and architecture of Pacific coastal South America.

Her first book, The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru, is written in two interrelated parts. The first is a critical history of archaeology and image making at the late Moche center of Pañamarca (ca. 500–800 CE). In it, Trever examines shifting dynamics between art and science in the representation of the site since the mid-nineteenth century. The second part, which is partially co-authored with her Peruvian collaborators, contains a heavily illustrated account of her team’s excavation, conservation, and documentation of wall paintings within Pañamarca’s monumental core.

Trever’s second book, Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History, offers a long history of mural art and figuration on the coast of Peru from about 2300 BCE until the ninth century CE. In that book, she develops approaches to the study of monumental images that were made and encountered in an era of history without writing. Currently, she is writing a third book on vision, visage, and viscerality in premodern South America, as framed by late nineteenth-century science and contemporary art practice.

Trever’s research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the Provost’s Office at Columbia, the Rubin-Ladd Foundation, the Rust Family Foundation, the Hellman Family Fund, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and the Fulbright-Hays program.

She has served on the board of directors of the Institute of Andean Studies since 2016, the advisory board of the Pre-Columbian Society of New York since 2019, and the advisory board of the journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History and the Visual (Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur) since its launch in 2020.

Trever welcomes interest from undergraduate and graduate students (MA and PhD) in all areas of Pre-Columbian art history and archaeology, as well as those interested in later topics of collection, reception, and engagement with the art, architecture, and visual culture of Pre-Hispanic Latin America.

Selected Publications

Books

Lisa Trever, Image Encounters: Moche Murals and Archaeo Art History (Austin: University of Texas Press, in press 2021).

Lisa Trever, The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru, with contributions by Jorge Gamboa, Ricardo Toribio, and Ricardo Morales (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University, 2017). 350 pp.

Reviews: Richard L. Burger, Journal of Anthropological Research 75, no. 3 (2019): 462–3.
                  Alicia Boswell, Journal of Medieval Worlds 1, no. 2 (2019): 97–100.
                  Sarahh E. M. Scher, Hispanic American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (2019): 145–7.
                  Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture 1, no. 1 (2019): 132–3.
                  Amanda V. Gannaway, Latin American Antiquity 29, no. 3 (2018): 632–3.

Edited Volumes

Marco Curatola Petrocchi, Cécile Michaud, Joanne Pillsbury, and Lisa Trever, eds., El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte andino antiguo (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2020). 550 pp.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Lisa Trever, “A Moche Riddle in Clay: Object Knowledge and Art Work in Ancient Peru,” The Art Bulletin 101, no. 4 (2019): 18–38.

2021 Article Award, Association for Latin American Art

Lisa Trever, “Criminal Lines, Indian Colours, and the Creation of a Black Legend: The Photographs of ‘Los Bandidos de la Halancha’, Bolivia,” History of Photography 40, no. 4 (2016): 369–387.

Lisa Trever, Jorge Gamboa Velásquez, Ricardo Toribio Rodríguez, and Flannery Surette, “A Moche Feathered Shield from the Painted Temples of Pañamarca, Peru,” Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of Andean Archaeology 33, no. 1 (2013): 103–118.

Lisa Trever, “Idols, Mountains, and Metaphysics in Guaman Poma’s Pictures of Huacas,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011): 39–59.

Joanne Pillsbury and Lisa Trever, “The King, the Bishop, and the Creation of an American Antiquity,” Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of Andean Archaeology 29 (2008): 191–219.

Revised Spanish translation: Joanne Pillsbury and Lisa Trever, “El rey, el obispo y la creación de una
antigüedad americana,” Historia y Cultura 30 (2019): 51–100.

Chapters in Peer-Reviewed Volumes

Lisa Trever, “Phenomenology and Iconography in Ancient Peruvian Mural Art,” in Ancient Art Revisited: Global Perspectives from Archaeology and Art History, ed. Christopher Watts and Carl Knappett (Routledge, under contract)

Luis Armando Muro and Lisa Trever, “Re-Evaluating Archaeological Discourses about the Moche of Northern Peru,” in Handbook of South American Archaeology, ed. Mark Aldenderfer, Eduardo Neves, and Marcela Sepúlveda (New York: Oxford University Press, in review).

Lisa Trever, “Cómo escribir una historia del arte para el ‘Nuevo Mundo antiguo’: Perspectivas desde una superficie pintada,” in El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte andino antiguo, ed. Marco Curatola Petrocchi, Cécile Michaud, Joanne Pillsbury, and Lisa Trever (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2020).

Marco Curatola Petrocchi, Cécile Michaud, Joanne Pillsbury, and Lisa Trever, “Para una historia del arte andino antiguo,” in El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte andino antiguo, ed. Marco Curatola Petrocchi, Cécile Michaud, Joanne Pillsbury, and Lisa Trever (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2020).

Lisa Trever, “The Artistry of Moche Mural Painting and the Ephemerality of Monuments,” in Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, ed. Cathy Lynne Costin (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University, 2016), 253–279.

Lisa Trever, “The Uncanny Tombs in Martínez Compañón’s Trujillo del Perú,” in Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas, ed. Joanne Pillsbury (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University, 2012), 106–140.

Lisa Trever and Joanne Pillsbury, “Martínez Compañón and his Illustrated ‘Museum,’” in Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 236–253, 325–332.

Revised Spanish translation: Lisa Trever and Joanne Pillsbury, “El obispo Martínez Compañón en los
albores de la historia de la arqueología peruana: Entre la ciencia, la fé y el conocimiento indígeno,” in La
arqueología ilustrada americana: La universalidad de una disciplina, ed. Jorge Maier Allende and
Leonardo López Luján (Madrid: Fundación de Municipios Pablo de Olavide, volume in preparation).

Book Reviews

Review of Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano (eds.), The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), in Renaissance Quarterly 74, no. 2 (forthcoming 2021).

Short Essays, Notes, and Commissioned Texts

Presentación (Foreword) to Régulo Franco Jordán, Moche: Iconografía y Cosmovisión (Lima: Instituto Peruano de Estudios Arqueológicos, 2021).

Lisa Trever, “Pre-Columbian Art History in the Age of the Wall,” Dialogues: The State and Future of Pre-Columbian Visual Culture Studies, guest edited by Cecelia F. Klein, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1, no 1 (2019): 100–104.

Duccio Bonavia and Lisa Trever, “Central Andean Mural Art,” in Grove Dictionary of Art Online: Latin American Art, Oxford University Press (forthcoming). Commission to revise and update Bonavia’s 1996 essay “Central Andean Mural Painting” for Grove Art.

Lisa Trever, “Las pinturas del centro olvidado de Pañamarca,” in El top anual de los grandes descubrimientos del Perú, ed. Jorge Sánchez (Lima: Perú Explorer, 2017), 422–431.

Lisa Trever, “La pintura mural mochica y la ortodoxia pictórica en Pañamarca,” in Moche y sus vecinos. Reconstruyendo identidades, ed. Cecilia Pardo and Julio Rucabado (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2016), 160–163, 230–231.