Dominican art comprises all the visual arts and plastic arts made in Dominican Republic. Since ancient times, various groups have inhabited the island of Ayíti/Quisqueya (the Indigenous names of the island), or Hispaniola (the name the Spanish gave to the island); the history of the country's art is generally compartmentalized into three periods: pre-Hispanic or Aboriginal Amerindian (500 BC to 1500 AD), Hispanic or colonial (1502 to 1821 AD), and the national or Dominican period (1844 to present day).
Archeological evidence for human populations on the island go back 6,000 years, when Archaic Age foragers arrived from South America to the Caribbean island. Going back to the origins of autochthonous art, corresponding to the stage known as prehistoric, primitive or pre-Hispanic, we find several ethnic groups that made up the Aboriginal culture: Taínos, Igneris, Ciboneyes, Kalinago and Guanahatabeyes.Danilo de los Santos. Memoria de la Pintura Dominicana. (Colección Centenario Grupo León Jimenes) 8v: il. Grupo León Jimenes. Santo Domingo, 2003. pg 76 Out of all of them, Taíno art was the majority and most widespread throughout the insular territory, leaving behind an abundance of pottery and ceramic structures.
The Indigenous era of the island came to end after Spanish invasion and colonization, beginning when Christopher Columbus arrived on the coasts of the island in 1492, leading to their decimation from enslavement, genocide, and foreign diseases. The newly "discovered" island was given the name "La Española" (Hispaniola) and became the first permanent European colony established in the Americas, Santo Domingo, in 1498. In this early period, most artworks were produced in Spain for shipment to Santo Domingo. Much of this early art no longer survive, considering many owners emigrated with their art, countless storms destroyed towns and their works, and Francis Drake's sacking of Santo Domingo in 1586 led to the disappearance of a lot of early colonial art.
The painting movement in Dominican society is young, considering it begins to sow its first fruits during the Independence of 1844. Since then, it has manifested in diverse forms and styles produced by the blend of Indigenous, European, and West African elements found in the culture. The most prominent styles throughout the country's history have been Romanticism, Costumbrismo, Impressionism, Neoclassicism, Naturalism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstract art. Some the most well known Dominican artists are Jaime Colson, Yoryi Morel, Dario Suro, Celeste Woss y Gil, and Guillo Perez.
Aboriginal Indigenous art
For millennia, the predominant inhabitants of Ayíti/Quisqueya were Arawak and Taíno peoples. They were Arawakan-speaking peoples, whose ancestors settled some 2,500 years before Columbus, having migrated from South America and replacing an earlier Archaic age people that had been wiped out. The Taínos formed an agricultural society with myriad artistic expression, including music, dance, body art, poetic myths, and an abundant production of ceramics, pottery, and sculptures in the Chicoid style, distinguished by its expressive symbolic decoration with sculptural features of stylized anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations.Garcia Arévalo, Manuel A. "MOTIVOS PICTÓRICOS EN LA CERÁMICA TAINA".https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/AA/00/06/19/61/00509/14-43.pdf p 541.
Taino art tends to be highly religious, loaded with animism. Along with rich ceramic and pottery art, rock engravings, called petroglyphs, and rock paintings, called pictographs, are abundant throughout the country's caves and caverns, dating back to approximately 2,000 years ago, although Taíno cave art is difficult to differentiate from those of earlier cultures; the Aboriginal rock art is not the work of a single settlement group, but rather the work of different groups throughout different moments of the island's history.Danilo de los Santos. Memoria de la Pintura Dominicana. (Colección Centenario Grupo León Jimenes) 8v: il. Grupo León Jimenes. Santo Domingo, 2003. pg 79 According to Taíno creation myths, the first humans, with the sun and the moon, emerged from caves in a sacred mountain on the island.Rouse, Irving (1992). The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. Yale University Press. . p 16. Caves were revered as holy places, and believed to be our world's connection to the underworld and where the dead would passage.
Of all the Antillean islands, Ayíti/Quisqueya appears to be the territory most abundant in petroglyphs.^ de los Santos. p 83 Moreover, the geographic distribution of the sites where rock/cave paintings are located correspond with the locations of historically intensive populations.^ de los Santos. p 86 Overall, two artistic languages are employed: that of a realistic, naturalistic approach, or an abstract approach by way of symbols, schemes, and stylizations. Motifs or designs of these rock art are classified into several groups:
Anthropomorphic: drawings of human figures.
Zoomorphs: animal representations.
Anthropozoomorphs: figuration that combines humans and animals.
Phytomorphs: figures of plants, flowers, fruits, etc.
Mytomorphs: representations of myths, legend, others.
Asteromorphs: figures of celestial stars^ de los Santos. p 88
By the mid-16th century, Spanish colonization had brought a brutal end to the Taíno civilization, having wiped out between 80 and 90% of the indigenous population through genocide and foreign-brought diseases."La tragédie des Taïnos", in L'Histoire n°322, July–August 2007, p. 16. Warfare, the encomienda system, and no resistance to Old World epidemic outbreaks, like smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus decimated the Taíno population on the island. Survivors had no choice but to assimilate into the Spanish colony, with many Dominicans today carrying native DNA. Over time, the mestizo children of the Spanish colonizers and Taíno concubines intermarried with West Africans after their arrival from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, creating the tri-racial Creole culture found in the country today.
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Art during the colonial era (1492–1821)
Soon after Christopher Columbus first arrived at the island, a divergent art style was introduced in Santo Domingo, the first seat of European artistic influence in the "New World". During the colonial period, art was characterized by religious-themed pictorial productions of Catholic icons, although mostly imported from Spain. Moreover, it was sacred and essentially anonymous, being that the first artists and craftsmen were brought to the island for the ornamentation of the first churches.Pérez, Silvia Pérez. Artistas españoles exiliados en el Caribe: el caso de la República Dominicana y Vela Zanetti. Diss. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2016. p 117 According to the Marquis of Lozoya, there were three capital works during the 16th century in the colony; these include a mural painting representing a martyred saint held in the Treasury Room of the Catedral Primada; the magnificent copy of the Virgen de la Antigua, found in a chapel in the same Cathedral; and La Virgen de Cristóbal Colón, believed to be the oldest preserved portrait of Columbus; though painted in Santo Domingo, it remains in display in Lázaro Galdiano Museum.^ de los Santos. p 100
Of the three works mentioned, the most important is the Virgin de la Antigua, painted in Seville between 1520 and 1523. It was saved from a shipwreck in the vicinity of the Virgin Islands when it was brought by ship to Santo Domingo and considered the first large-format painting to arrive to the Americas, measuring at 2.85 meters in height by 1.75 wide.
Another imported though significant painting during the colonial period is Nuestra Señora de la Altragracia, held in the Basílica Catedral de Higüey. Considered the oldest preserved painting of the colony, it was brought to the island by two brothers, Alonso and Antonio de Trejo, from their home in Placencia, in the region of Extremadura in 1502. During this time, the sacred image of the Virgin Mary took on a special role in the colony and became represented by this painting. According to traditional legend, the Virgin de la Altagracia appeared beneath an orange tree in the town of Higüey, inspiring invocations and turning her into a national icon of the island. Since the early 1500s to the present day, Nuestra Señora de la Altragracia has been viewed as the maximum expression of the Marian cult for all Dominicans of Catholic faith.
Overall, the Hispanic, Catholic and stately aesthetic, including a medieval-renaissance eclecticism, reflects the art of the period, and is above all expressed in the civil and religious architecture of Santo Domingo during this time.^ de los Santos. p 113 The first century of Spanish colonialism didn't produce any mestizo art, considering Spanish exploitation was too severe. Moreover, during the 17th century, Hispaniola faced a period of isolation and general poverty, in which a creole mentality was beginning to be defined in the majority mixed population, in isolation, and in religious cults, like the Altagraciano, associated with offerings, miracles, veneration and the iconographic multiplicity of the maternal image.^ de los Santos. p 105
The anonymity of early colonial painters is explained by the fact that the majority did not sign their works. No knowledge of other painters survive like artists Francisco Velásquez, painter of the Twelve Apostles displayed in the Cathedral Primada, and Diego José Hilaris, whose series of paintings cover miracles of the Virgin Mary that took place throughout the colony. Despite no specificities concerning their biography survive, we know they were criollos born on the island during the mid-1700s. Hilaris, painted his series, known as medallions for their shape, in the latter half of the 1700s; of the 27 whose existence is known, 10 have been lost. In the case of Velásquez, it is said that he was born in Santo Domingo in the last half of the 18th century and died between 1822 and 1830. With respect to Hilaris, it is believed that he was born in Higüey, between 1760 and 1778 with no estimated year of death.^ de los Santos. p 124
Fundamentally, the artistic relevance of the colonial era lies in architecture, as Darío Suro points out. Construction needs generated by the founding of the new city resulted in a broad urban development that is exemplified in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, the Fortaleza Ozama, the palace house of Diego Colón, and the old convent of Las Mercedes in Santo Domingo.
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19th century – Origins of a national art
Fine arts developed fairly late in Dominican Republic compared to many neighboring islands, however by the 1870s, the country was experiencing a flourishing of the arts. The repressive six-year period of Buenaventura Báez's government ended; the threat of annexation to the United States disappeared after the bill is rejected in the Senate; and in the beginning of 1874, a Constituent Assembly is called to reform the fundamental Charter of the country.^ de los Santos. pg 150 This reform and others that take place later, all liberal in nature, along with the development of trade and the emergence of modern, albeit small, industries contributed to an atmosphere of optimism for the country. The founding of various teaching centers and civic societies that promoted the creation of artistic and literary works contributed to this societal reform and the flourishing of the arts.^ de los Santos. p 77