Recent Writing
Spring 2025: The Spirit Within / El espíritu inherente: Art and Life in Latin America / Arte y vida en Latinoamérica, the book I co-authored with Patricia Lagarde, the Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow has been published! This is the Walters Art Museum's first fully bilingual publication, beautifully illustrated, includes short selections from Indigenous language texts of the Americas and in clear and simple terms explains some of the Indigenous beliefs surrounding materials of the Ancient Americas.
This volume, coinciding with the opening of permanent Art of the Americas galleries at the Walters Art Museum in 2025, examines how, for people in the Indigenous Americas, materials had and continue to have a life of their own.
Ancient and modern craftspeople shaped jade, gold, feathers, and clay into exquisite artworks, but the meanings of those objects are intertwined with the living essence of the raw materials themselves.
Thirty-five highlights, ancient to contemporary, provide a window into the spiritual and intellectual context in which these objects were understood by the Indigenous people who made and used them.
Este tomo, que coincide con la apertura de las galerías permanentes Arte de las Américas en 2025, examina cómo, para los pueblos indígenas de las Américas, los materiales tenían y siguen teniendo vida propia.
Al igual que lo hacían los artesanos de la antigüedad, los de hoy dan forma al jade, al oro, a las plumas o a la arcilla para crear exquisitas obras de arte cuyo significado en tanto objetos está entrelazado también con la esencia viva de las propias materias primas.
Son 35 las piezas destacadas de la colección de las Américas, tanto antiguas como contemporáneas, que permiten apreciar el contexto espiritual e intelectual en el que fueron concebidos estos objetos por los pueblos indígenas que los fabricaron y emplearon.
Get it on Amazon or at the bookstore you prefer!
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Spring 2025: The Other America: Displaying Pre-Columbian as Art in American Art Museums, a volume I am co-editing with Dr. Victoria Lyall of the Denver Art Museum will be published in Fall 2025 as a Mayer Center Symposium proceeding. Together, we wrote an Introduction to this volume, which brings together new scholarship from curators and former curators from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, and from the Getty Research Institute. I also wrote an essay “Dealers, Donors, and Directors: A New Look at Mid-Atlantic Collections of Ancient American Art” for the volume. This will be the first synthetic history of curating and displaying ancient and Indigenous materials as art in American art museums.
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Fall 2024: My essay on ancient Zapotec tombs was published in the volume Figuración Humana en Mesoamérica Prehispánica: Arqueología, Iconografías y Lecturas , published by British Archaeological Reports. The book has been masterfully edited by Chantal Huckert and Miriam Judith Gallegos Gómora, of the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Centro Tabasco, respectively. Looking forward to publishing more of my dissertation research soon. The BAR volume is available on their website.
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Summer 2023: "The Latino community is not a monolith": I had the privilege and pleasure of writing about the wonderful Nicaraguan-American artist Jessy DeSantis and their work for BmoreArt's Print issue 15, which rolled out in July 2023. (Jessy is pictured above.) You can read the full story here.
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My essay "Smoothing the Path for Rough Stones: The Changing Role of Pre-Columbian Art in the Arensberg Collection," was one of three essays in the book Hollywood Arensberg : Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A., published by the Getty Research Institute in October, 2020.
About Hollywood Arensberg: During the first half of the twentieth century, Louise and Walter Arensberg not only assembled one of the world’s preeminent art collections but carved out a unique place in the history of collecting. No one before them had made such audacious connections between modern painting, Renaissance literature, and pre-Columbian sculpture; and few (if any) used collecting more forcefully as a medium for artistic creation and intellectual exploration.
The Arensbergs’ collection first took shape in their Manhattan apartment, where—in the wake of the Armory Show of 1913—they gave Marcel Duchamp his first American home and presided over the salon that brought Dada to New York. It expanded rapidly after their move to Los Angeles in 1921, particularly after they purchased 7065 Hillside Avenue and turned it into a domestic museum and research institute. For the next three decades they put the European Avant-Garde, the English Renaissance, and Mesoamerican civilizations into dialogue in dense and playful displays whose visual patterns and hidden meanings shocked and inspired visitors—including some of the period’s leading artists, writers, and curators.
When Louise and Walter died in 1953 and ’54, their art, library, and personal papers were divided between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and California’s Francis Bacon Library (now housed at the Huntington). This book uses photographic and archival records–never before assembled or examined—to reconstruct and reinterpret the couple’s collection when it was still under one extraordinary roof in the heart of Hollywood’s burgeoning artistic scene. Bringing together images from many sources, some of them seen here for the first time, Hollywood Arensberg takes us on a wall-by-wall tour of the rooms where Marcel Duchamp and Sir Francis Bacon played secret games of chess on Aztec calendar stones.
Review:
“The authors of Hollywood Arensberg put into context the dozens of important modern masterworks that were displayed alongside non-Western—mainly pre-Columbian—art in the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg. The specific conversation between pre-Columbian objects and modern works by Duchamp, Picasso, Kandinsky, and others as experienced in the Arensberg home is a revelation. In this context of deep interchange between modern and pre-Columbian, Ellen Hoobler's essay examines the transformations in the Arensbergs' understanding of pre-Columbian form together with the effects of a burgeoning art market in Los Angeles after 1930 in what will be seen as a significant contribution to the history of pre-Columbian art collecting and its relation to modernism.”
—Rex Koontz, Professor of Art History, University of Houston and Consulting Curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
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Hoobler was co-editor, with Andrew Finegold, of the book Visual Culture in the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.) She has published in journals including the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, American Indian Quarterly, the Journal of the Walters Art Museum, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.
Full texts of some of Hoobler's articles can be found on Academia.edu and Researchgate. Others are available on request.
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With students Arturo Hernández, Jr., Ve’Amber Miller, and Catherine Quinn, Hoobler worked on digital reconstructions of Zapotec tombs of Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico. All four collaborators wrote about their work in an article in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. More about this work can be found here.
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Her next project deals with the art and archaeology of ancient Oaxaca, in southern Mexico.