The Denver Art Museum's New World department includes both pre-and post-Columbian sections, and patrons Jan and Fred Mayer were principal sponsors of two relevant shows designed to showcase both. First was the post-Columbian offering,
Painting a New World, which surveyed Mexican colonial painting. Then came the pre-Columbian
Tiwanaku, which examined a little known civilization in Bolivia. Donna Pierce, the DAM's curator of Spanish colonial art, put together
Painting a New World, and Margaret Young-S´nchez, the museum's curator of pre-Columbian art, did
Tiwanaku. The two shows were predicted to have low attendance, and they did. But they were fine, well-thought-out shows, so it's great the DAM did them anyway.