Eric Mazariegos
Eric is a specialist in the art, architecture, and archaeology of the Indigenous (“Pre-Columbian”) Americas. His primary research interests center on questions of visuality, materiality, and ecology, asking how aesthetic innovations and material preferences can reveal Indigenous modalities of beholding, philosophies of matter, and relational ways of experiencing and inhabiting the world. Holding a Minor in Latinx art history, he is also interested in the modern and contemporary reception of Pre-Columbian art.
His dissertation, “The Coastal Ecologies of El Dorado: Aesthetics, Materiality, and the Unmaking of Tairona Gold, ca. 1000-1500 CE,” examines metalworks attributed to the Tairona civilization of ancient Colombia. It argues that Tairona artists mediated their metalworks formally and materially in relation to undulating Caribbean waves and the oxygen-rich humidity of the coastal atmosphere. Though Tairona “goldworks” have been widely understood as iconographically legible and materially stable, Eric’s research reveals that Tairona metallurgists cultivated aesthetic instability and material volatility in their visual culture, thereby shifting established perspectives on gold as a stable, enduring medium. The first art history dissertation on the Tairona, the project contributes to new a wave in scholarship of the pre-colonial Americas which seeks to decenter the Aztec (Mexica/Nahua) and Inka empires, instead honing in on the marginal communities that flourished at the littoral margins of those grand imperial centers.
Supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Columbia University Office of the Provost, Eric has conducted collections-based research throughout Colombia (Cartagena, Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and Bogotá) and in major United States museums (in New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Tucson, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and more). In 2023, he contributed to the exhibition catalogue for El Dorado: Myths of Gold, published by the Americas Society, New York. In 2022, he trained in the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA) at the Harvard Art Museums. Eric earned a BA in art history and Spanish from UCLA in 2019 (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude), where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and University of California Regents Scholar. Between 2025-2026, Eric is a Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC.
Recent academic conference talks:
“The Shape of Tairona Time: Art, Technologies, Ecologies.” 113th annual conference of the College Art Association. New York, NY. February 15, 2025.
“Pre-Columbian Art Beyond Itself: Tairona Metallurgy’s Material Anachrony.” 50th annual Cleveland Symposium. Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. November 23, 2024.
- 2nd Place Best Paper Prize
“Pre-Columbian Art History at the University of California: Teaching, Mentorship, and Disciplinary Contention.” 89th annual conference of the Society for American Archaeology. New Orleans, Louisiana. April 21, 2024.