Eloise Quiñones Keber passed away on 30 May 2023, surrounded by family and loved ones. Her contributions as an art historian, an educator, a mentor, and a human being are incalculable. This obituary captures but a fraction of the tremendous gifts that she has bestowed in the fields of art history, ethnohistory, Mesoamerican studies, and colonial Latin American history and visual culture.
Eloise received her BA and MA (in English Literature) at UCLA and her PhD in Art History at Columbia University where she would begin a lifelong journey into the study of ancient Mesoamerica. She completed her MA in 1979 and her PhD in 1984, making her one of the first Mexican Americans to receive a PhD in pre-Columbian art history. In addition to Esther Pasztory, her dissertation adviser, Eloise also worked under the guidance of H. B. Nicholson, a renowned expert in Mesoamerican manuscripts and lifelong friend and mentor. Her dissertation research on the Codex Telleriano-Remensis became the subject of her award-winning 1995 book, Codex Telleriano-Remensis: ritual, divination, and history in a pictorial Aztec manuscript, published by the University of Texas Press, which was granted the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Association of American University Presses Illustrated Book Award. Her meticulous iconographical and linguistic analysis of this early colonial manuscript continues to serve as the definitive source in the field.
Eloise Quiñones Keber is the author of over fifty articles and book chapters, spanning a breathtaking array of subject matter, from representations of divination and ritual in the Florentine codex to Alexander von Humboldt’s drawings of Mexica monumental sculpture. As I pore over Eloise’s CV in search of synthetic threads across a four-decade career that defies simple summation, I am struck by her deep recognition of the scholars who paved the way for her own scholarship through contributions to countless homenaje volumes such as her ‘The Aztec image of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl,’ published in Smoke and mist: Mesoamerican studies in memory of Thelma D. Sullivan (1988); her essay, ‘La représentation des rituels dans le Tonalamatl du Codex Borbonicus,’ published in Mille ans de civilisation mesoaméricaine des Mayas aux Aztèques: hommages à Jacques Soustelle (1995); and ‘H. B. Nicholson and the archaeological bug,’ published in Fanning the sacred flame: Mesoamerican studies in honor of H. B. Nicholson (2012), among many others. As I recall in my graduate seminars with Professor Keber, she always urged us to dive deeply into the historiographical foundations of our respective subfields and to treat that scholarship with care and respect—an important counterpoint to the common graduate student penchant for critique above all else. She helped us to recognize that the scholars that came before us are not mere abstractions, but actual people. This spirit of homage, collaboration, and community building profoundly marked every facet of Eloise’s career.
Eloise was an avid scholar of Aztec art and culture. In 1983, while still a graduate student at Columbia, she co-authored (with H. B. Nicholson) the important catalogue Art of Aztec Mexico: treasures of Tenochtitlan, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery of Art. This catalogue received the 1984 Award of Distinction from the American Association of Museums. She published widely on Aztec religion and ritual, offering rich interpretations of visual culture’s entanglement with cosmology, such as ‘Mayahuel and maguey: sustenance and sacrifice in an Aztec myth’ in Latin American Indian Literatures Journal (1989); ‘Quetzalcoatl, patrono dinástico mexica’ in Arqueología Mexicana (2002); and ‘Female deities of divination in Aztec manuscripts,’ in Painted books and Indigenous knowledge in Mesoamerica: manuscript studies in honor of Mary Elizabeth Smith, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone (2005).
Her fascination with early colonial pictorial manuscripts spurred a florescence of scholarship on the Florentine Codex and particularly the critical role of Bernardino de Sahagún as compiler and ethnographer, including the co-edited volume, with J. Jorge Klor de Alva and H. B. Nicholson, The work of Bernardino de Sahagún: pioneer ethnographer of 16th-century Aztec Mexico (Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, 1988); and the edited volume, Chipping away on earth: studies in prehispanic and colonial Mexico in honor of Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Labyrinthos Press, 1994). Her decades-long passion for the Florentine Codex culminated in her 2019 essay, ‘Surviving conquest: depicting Aztec deities in Sahagún’s Historia,’ published in The Florentine Codex: an encyclopedia of the Nahua world in sixteenth-century Mexico, edited by Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano (University of Texas Press).
As anyone who knew her in life is aware, Eloise was an active participant in scholarly conferences. She organized and chaired over twenty sessions at the College Art Association, American Society for Ethnohistory, Renaissance Society of America, International Congress of Americanists annual conferences over the span of four decades, many of which led to field-defining edited volumes, including her edited volume Representing Aztec ritual: performance, text, and image in the work of Sahagún (University Press of Colorado, 2002), which originated as a panel at the 1997 meeting for the American Society for Ethnohistory, and her 2013 special issue of Colonial Latin American Review, ‘Art and evangelization: creating a new art in 16th-century Mexican missions,’ which derived from a panel she organized at the International Congress of Americanists held in Mexico City in 2009.
Eloise was a veteran professor at the City University of New York, where she held dual affiliations at Baruch College (from 1986 to 2012) and the Graduate Center (from 1993 to 2012). As one of the most diverse university systems in the nation that provides an affordable and accessible pathway for low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented minority students to gain access to a world-class education, the impact of Eloise’s three decades of service within the CUNY system cannot be overstated. Her office door was a veritable academic nightclub, with throngs of students lined around the corner awaiting a few minutes of her time. She taught an array of courses in pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American art at the undergraduate and graduate level, including specialized seminars on Mesoamerican manuscripts, Mexican mural painting, and Andean art. She had an electrifying presence in the classroom, able to command students’ rapt attention with her effortless teaching style.
She insisted on seeing, as much as possible, in person and experiencing directly every work of art that she taught, whether paintings, works of art, or archeological sites. This took her through Latin America from the heights of Machu Picchu to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, and Europe, from East Berlin past Checkpoint Charlie to the depths of the Vatican Library. She always thought that only then could she teach with the necessary knowledge and the depth of feeling she had and knew how to convey. She would tell her students that at the end of each semester, she would rip up her lecture notes so that each semester she would approach the material with fresh eyes (an admirable pedagogical exercise, but one that I admittedly could never emulate!).
Over the span of her career, Eloise trained one of the most diverse cohorts of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American PhDs in the nation, serving as committee chair for nearly twenty students and committee member of dozens more. She helped each student nurture her or his scholarly interests and voice, with a firm yet compassionate spirit. Eloise, along with her colleague James Saslow at the CUNY Graduate Center, was instrumental in reorganizing the graduate curriculum to include exams and specializations in global early modern and colonial Latin American art in the early 2000s, thus placing this institution at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary art historical inquiry that moved far beyond the Western/non-Western binary. She was a fierce advocate for her students and supported us in all of our aspirations. She continually pushed us to reach for the stars, providing rounds upon rounds of critical feedback on our seminar papers, fellowship applications, dissertation drafts, and job application materials. Her energy was boundless (and we often joked that she had the lifestyle of a monk; we all came to expect emails from her by 5:30 a.m.!), and she never missed a deadline. When considering her life and career in its totality, it is mind-boggling to comprehend the amount of time, dedication, and love that she poured into her students, colleagues, and the scholarly community at large.
Eloise Quiñones Keber was born on 10 January 1941 in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Margaret Romero and Rudolph Quiñones. A bright and precocious young child, she was remembered by family members as having been the one to voraciously whip through novels and history books while the other children played with their matchbox cars. Eloise’s insatiable love of learning continued through her adolescence and young adulthood.
In addition to her formidable academic talents, Eloise was also a talented potter, and it was this skill that led her on a transcontinental journey to New York City, where she initially pursued a career teaching ceramics prior to her graduate studies at Columbia University. She was well-known for her knack of expertly managing the kiln, stuffing it to the brim with unfired ceramics and never breaking a single one. Eloise will be deeply missed, always treasured, and never forgotten.