Grooming After Mexican Biombo 17th Century

Ashley Offill, Curator of Collections

Clouds of gold leaf float among daffodils that spray arcs of droplets, while irregularly shaped chips of mother-of-pearl are surrounded by radiating halos of pastel-colored lines. Scattered within this dreamlike landscape are various small vignettes—a mixture of interior and exterior scenes in which women care for each other's hair, iron clothing, or simply relax.

Larissa Bates was born to an American father and Costa Rican mother in Burlington, Vermont, and grew up between Vermont and Vara Blanca, Costa Rica. A generation earlier, her American maternal grandfather met her Costa Rican grandmother while working for the United Fruit Company—a U.S. corporation controlling regions across Central America. Bates's mother, who passed away when Bates was only three years old, connected her to a strong matrilineal Costa Rican heritage. In her work, Bates is interested in mining colonial and neo-colonial Latin American history and the ways that history can intertwine with her own biography, exploring concepts of hybridity and acculturation.

As a result of Bates's complex family history and separation from the life she might have had if she lived in Costa Rica with her grandmother, her works often explore the social function of families and the role of women in forming identity, or what Bates refers to as the "social performance of family structures." In many of her works, including Grooming After Mexican Biombo 17th Century, Bates includes daffodils as a symbol of colonialism in the tradition of the Caribbean author Jamaica Kincaid. Here, these European flowers spray torrents of droplets across the painting to evoke the United Fruit Company's use of pesticides in Costa Rica. Decades of scientific study have demonstrated that the United Fruit Company overused pesticides in the interests of producing expansive quantities of store-quality bananas, harming both their underpaid local workforce and the regional environment. Highlighting this harmful practice is personal to Bates, whose mother died of cancer that could be linked to the chemical exposure that negatively affected many Costa Ricans and other local peoples in regions controlled by the United Fruit Company.

The title of the work references a biombo, a type of folding screen that was popular in viceregal Mexico in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word biombo echoes the movement of the furnishing itself; this type of screen originated in Japan and was called a byōbu, and they first made their way to Portugal and New Spain as diplomatic gifts and trade goods. The screens were so popular that local workshops began to make their own versions, adding Mexican biombos to the market alongside the screens that were imported from Japan. Bates's choice of materials here, particularly the gold leaf and mother-of-pearl, likewise reference the 17th-century global trade routes that passed materials, luxury goods, and artistic styles between Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Colonial Americas. The mother-of-pearl inlay evokes enconchado painting, in which artists inlay fragments of iridescent shell (concha) and mother-of-pearl into a painted panel. While this technique was inspired by imported Japanese lacquerware, the enconchado was created by highly skilled artists in Mexico. Bates engages with these histories of craft and materiality to question concepts of cultural ownership and authenticity.

Provenance: The artist, 2019; to Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, New York, 2019; sold to present collection, 2024.

Supplementary Materials:

Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth exhibition catalogue 

An example of a biombo at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas

An example of an enconchado painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Click here to view this object's catalogue entry.