Daniela Gutierrez-Flores, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of California, Davis

Produced during the height of Spanish imperial expansion, paintings of still lifes and kitchen scenes—known as bodegones—have often been understood as richly symbolic commentaries on vanity and the fleeting nature of life. Yet before it designated a pictorial genre, the word bodegón referred to a space of eating and provisioning, where food was prepared for ordinary and often poor people. This talk invites viewers to look again at these images not simply as displays of Baroque abundance or moral allegories, but as windows onto the lived realities of food-making labor in the long seventeenth century.

$10; free for members at the Individual level and above, and SMU students/faculty/staff.