What can the tiny chia seed reveal about the history of oil painting?
For centuries, one of the most prized mediums of art at museums like The Met has been oil painting, a European tradition embodied by the so-called “Old Masters.” This is the story of how the oil of the chia seed—yes, the same one that’s a staple add-on for smoothies and acai bowls—and its origins in Mexico could help us look at oil painting and our world with fresh eyes.
Read the complete transcript below.
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Season 2 of Immaterial is made possible by Dasha Zhukova Niarchos. Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund.
The research presented in this episode has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Transcript
CAMILLE DUNGY: I wanna start this episode off by talking about recipes. Think of the last time you followed a recipe. There’s a whole industry of chefs and test kitchen experts who pride themselves on developing the best recipe for a certain dish. The best brownie. The best lasagna.
Now, I’m a bit of a chef myself. And I love sifting through these recipes. Trying to find that platonic ideal of something like a chocolate chip cookie. But the thing about these recipes is that most of them are…relatively similar. Variations on a theme. Sure, some of them ask you to brown the butter. Others tell you to keep the butter ice cold. But still, butter.
Today though, I want you to imagine something different. Imagine you stumble across a recipe for cookies…that had something you might never have imagined you’d see in a recipe. You see the usual suspects—flour, sugar, butter, eggs…and then…something at the bottom of the list makes you do a double take:
Mushrooms.
Seeing something like that would be shocking, right? Today’s story is about exactly that kind of surprising discovery. Not in a recipe for food, but on a shopping list for art supplies.
What I learned recently is that lots of painters historically have made their own paints. And they follow recipes too. There are certain core ingredients that make up any painter’s list.
Elsa Arroyo is a researcher at the National University of Mexico who is interested in art and these kinds of art-making recipes.
ELSA ARROYO: I'm specialized in colonial paintings from sixteenth century, fifteenth century.
DUNGY: She often finds herself digging through the archives for these kinds of materials.
ARROYO: We have in Mexico this Archivo General de la Nación.
DUNGY: The Mexican National Archives.
ARROYO: A big institution who reunite the different sources from different historical periods of our country.
DUNGY: And a few years ago, she stumbled upon a surprise.
ARROYO: We went to the archive and we saw this list.
DUNGY: It was a shopping list for art materials from 1715. And while most of the ingredients on the list were pretty standard for making oil paint of the kind she knew was used at the time, there was one ingredient that immediately stood out to Elsa:
Chia oil.
More than twelve liters of it. This…was a wild discovery. Here’s why.
In 1715 Mexico was being ruled by Spain. The Spanish brought plenty with them to Mexico—weapons, diseases, religion, and oil painting traditions. And the choice ingredient of Europe’s “Old Masters” was linseed oil. Chia oil was unheard of as an ingredient for oil paintings. For someone like Elsa, seeing chia oil on a shopping list was not too different from seeing mushrooms in a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It really surprised her.
More than that, the list made her wonder: was using chia oil to make oil paint common practice in Mexico? Did Mexican painters use chia oil to make their work?
I’m Camille Dungy, and this is Immaterial.
In this episode, we’re going to investigate how and why chia oil ended up on this shopping list—and I’d argue that the answer to that question could help democratize art history. That tiny seed could very well de-center European art traditions and could help reclaim what is considered the finest of fine art. The simple idea that chia oil was used in paintings instead of, or in addition to linseed oil—well, it’s a little seed that’s going to take us on a bit of a journey…
We’ll go to Mexico to learn from Indigenous artisans, who are keeping traditional Mexican artmaking techniques alive. And we’ll meet the scientists, curators, and conservators whose work could reorder how we understand history itself, potentially upending how places like The Met assign value and meaning to objects in its collection.
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RONDA KASL: So this is the work that I wanted to show you. First I have to ask you if you're surprised by it.
DUNGY: We’re standing at one of those places at The Met that just feels important. It’s at the top of the main stairs in a giant room that serves as the entryway to the European Paintings galleries. But as you enter these galleries to see some of the Museum's most prized paintings, if you look to the left, there’s an object that catches your eye. It is surprising, it’s not a painting, it’s not European, and it’s key to the story of chia oil in art. This object was made in 1760s Mexico.
Entry to the European Paintings galleries (Gallery 600). The Mexican batea (2020.321) at the far left is surrounded by European paintings and sculptures. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. November 2023
KASL: It would be 1764, to be precise.
DUNGY: This is Ronda Kasl, she's the curator of Latin American art at The Met. And she’s brought us to a tray. Well, sort of.
KASL: I think people who are familiar with photographs of it are really surprised when they see how big it is.
DUNGY: It's three and a half feet across, big as a semi tire. And it's made of a single piece of cedar. It's a giant, round, shallow tray, or dish—
KASL: This is a batea.
José Manuel de la Cerda (Mexican, active 18th century). Turnus Provoked into War by Aeneas, ca. 1764. Wood, painted lacquer, gold, Diameter 42 in. (106.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and Sansbury-Mills Fund, 2020 (2020.321)
DUNGY: A batea. But the size and shape are the least of what you notice when you see it for the first time. It shines.
[MUSIC]
KASL: They compared its reflective qualities to mirrors.
Backside of José Manuel de la Cerda's batea (2020.321)
DUNGY: It's a rich, deep, lustrous, inky black. The shiny surface is achieved using…chia oil.
KASL: The lacquer technique used to create this object involves the use of local materials. So it was a combination of chia oil; aje, which is a fat derived from insects; mineral clay; and colorants.
DUNGY: Lacquered bateas were prized objects in Mexico and their shiny black surfaces captured one group in particular: the Spanish ruling class. But to get to how chia oil wound up in prized possessions of the Spanish, let’s catch up with a bit of history. Starting with some five hundred-year-old gourds…
MONICA KATZ: So the objects that were originally lacquered that we have found evidence of have been mainly gourds. Nobody actually knows but we believe they for drinking chocolate.
DUNGY: This is Monica Katz, she's a conservator emerita from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, and for years she's been fascinated by chia oil and its early days on the scene in Mexico. She is describing one of the earliest uses of chia oil that we know of.
KATZ: These very beautifully colored gourds were valued at the time and they were used mainly as drinking vessels, waterproof drinking vessels.
DUNGY: The story of chia is also a story of Mexico. And I say A story because of course what we know has everything to do with who is telling the tale.
KATZ: So much of what we know about Mexico comes through the optics of the Spanish that went there.
DUNGY: The Spanish conquest of Mexico began in 1519. And among the Spanish colonizers were the conquistadors who were there to bring back riches for the crown, and the missionaries who were there to convert local populations to Christianity. One group was after treasure and the other, souls.
KATZ: It's really a religious story. I mean, they basically felt that they were there both to plunder but also to convert. That was the major sort of philosophical aim of the conquest of the Americas.
DUNGY: It’s crucial to recognize the violence of conquest. The catastrophic impacts.
ARROYO: This is very difficult for me when I teach for my students now because how, how you can explain when in Mexico, we lost around eighty percent of the local population.
DUNGY: This is Elsa Arroyo again. The researcher at the National University of Mexico in Mexico City.
ARROYO: Eighty percent is what the historian of the demographic processes are saying. It's incredible. It's very sad. It's, no, everything was erased in that time.
DUNGY: Not everything, but it was a brutal new reality. Our friend, chia, was nearly lost as well. According to some experts, the loss of the Mexican population caused a massive decrease in the cultivation of this Mexican ancestral crop. It has been reported that in 1550, there were 30,000 hectares of chia being produced in north-central Mexico. By 1810, this area had decreased to only a few hectares. And if that weren’t dire enough, the Spanish also noticed that the natives weren't really taking a shine to Jesus.
KATZ: They were feeling that they were not really converting as many people as they felt they could.
DUNGY: That’s Monica Katz again. The Spanish had a hunch about what might be keeping so many people clinging to their old ways, their old gods. I’ll give you a hint: art.
KATZ: The fact that these objects still existed were allowing the Indigenous communities to backslide in their zeal towards Catholicism.
DUNGY: By objects, Monica means the many, many things that were thought to have symbolic value to the Indigenous peoples of what became Mexico. The Spanish thought if they could destroy that symbolism and its power, they could replace it with something new.
KATZ: And so they, they basically destroyed, they destroyed huge numbers. Obviously, they didn't destroy everything. But we certainly don't have the quantity of objects at our disposal that we might otherwise have had.
DUNGY: The new thing was Spanish rule and Catholicism, hand in hand. Before long, every town had a new government and a new church, the tentacles of an empire.
ARROYO: Imagine you need a church for each town. You need a new monastery for each order in each city. So this was a big project including carpenters, painters, the people who did, for example, windows, people who created all the textiles and also the wealthy families wanted to work with the most renowned artists. You have all this investment, and with that you defend your privileged position in front of all the society.
DUNGY: So let’s review. Before the Spanish arrive, Mexicans are cultivating chia. Lots of it. And using the oil to waterproof gourds. The Spanish arrive in 1519 and do a lot of damage. Damage to the chia crop, damage to art, damage to Mexican society, and, most importantly, lethal damage to millions of Mexicans. And as they start to build “New Spain” in their image, they draw on the conventions they bring with them from Europe. Specifically oil painting and the choice ingredient of Europe’s “Old Masters”: linseed oil.
In Europe, linseed was the material that the most established painters used to bind their paint. It was so ubiquitous that in most cases, when we talk about “oil painting,” it's assumed that we're talking about linseed.
Ok, stick with me. Here comes the plot twist…
Remember the beginning of the episode when we mentioned a shopping list? At the bottom of the list was the signature of a painter named Juan Correa. He was tasked with acquiring the art-making materials on the list in Mexico City.
ARROYO: Juan Correa was born in Mexico City. And he was owner of one of the biggest workshops for paintings in Mexico City.
DUNGY: Met paintings conservator José Lazarte says Correa was as close to an art star as you could get in 1700s Mexico City.
JOSÉ LAZARTE: He's painting in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico, which at the time is this most important religious complex in New Spain, which is modern day Mexico. And so he's, you know, working very large scale, we're talking twenty, thirty-feet-tall canvases.
This large-scale painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando installed at The Met was contemporaneous with Juan Correa's large scale projects.
DUNGY: Those two thirty-foot paintings by Juan Correa are a focal point of the National Cathedral of Mexico. They’re striking for their use of color.
ARROYO: Translucent lakes in red and purple and orange.
DUNGY: And light.
ARROYO: This finishing, very translucent and bright, created through the use of these vibrant surfaces and transform all the experience of the people that used that space.
DUNGY: The paintings at the National Cathedral were just a few of his many, many commissions. He was in great demand, so much so that he ran a bustling workshop to help him complete all his work.
Triptych of paintings by Juan Correa (Mexican, ca. 1645–1716) Left: Angel Carrying a Cypress (Ángel portando un ciprés), ca. 1680–1690. Oil on canvas, unframed: 63 x 42 1/2 in. (160 x 108.5 cm); framed: 69 1/2 x 49 x 3 1/2 in. (176.5 x 124.5 x 8.9 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of Mexican Art Deaccession Fund (M.2013.129), Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA Center: Allegory of the Holy Sacrament, ca. 1690. Oil paint on canvas, 64 1/2 x 41 5/8 in. (163.8 x 105.7 cm). Denver Art Museum: Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer (2015.570). Photography courtesy Denver Art Museum Right: Attributed to Juan Correa and workshop. The Virgin of Valvanera, ca. 1710. Oil on canvas, 79 1/2 in. x 57 5/8 in. (201.9 x 146.4 cm). Denver Art Museum: Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer (2008.832). Photography courtesy Denver Art Museum
ARROYO: So, I imagine fifty men doing activities such as grinding pigments, preparing the canvases, applying drawings.
DUNGY: Correa was an oil painter with a capital P. His education, his experience as an oil painter—all of it would have steeped him in the conventions of the oil painting traditions of Europe, including the use of linseed oil. Which makes the 1715 list so surprising—at the height of his success he was asked to get liters of chia oil.
LAZARTE: Two botijuelas which at the time is a big ceramic jar of sorts. So using this oil and mixing with pigments, ground pigments, to paint.
DUNGY: According to José, that’s a lot of oil. Of chia oil. But wait, hadn’t chia been nearly wiped out? What remained, pushed to the margins?
And here it is on this list, with the name of one of Mexico’s most important painters signed at the bottom. And he apparently knew where to find chia oil. More than twelve liters of it.
Why was there so much chia oil on this list? And what might an artist like Juan Correa have been using it for?
After the break, we meet the team in pursuit of answers to these questions. And we’ll look at why analyzing chia oil is such a, um, slippery subject. Sorry.
[MUSIC]
—
DUNGY: I want to properly introduce you to José Lazarte.
LAZARTE: I am Assistant Paintings Conservator here at The Metropolitan Museum.
DUNGY: José reminds us what it might have been like to shop for art materials at the time Juan Correa and his contemporaries were painting commissions for national cathedrals and wealthy families…
LAZARTE: We need to keep in mind that the eighteenth century artists are making their own paint in their studios, right? So that they're getting all of these prime materials.
DUNGY: Oil on an artist’s shopping list is almost certainly an ingredient that they’re using to make their own paint.
LAZARTE: There is not really a supply store where they can just go.
DUNGY: Today when you walk into an art supply store, the choices are almost overwhelming. And whether you’re new to painting or not, you have a lot of decisions to make. Do you like the fluid and luminous effect of watercolor paint? Or do you prefer the satiny appearance of acrylic paint? Or do you need your paint to come out of a spray can?
Today, you can buy your paint pre-mixed and ready-to-go in nearly any form that suits—cans, tubes, pans, cakes, jars, pots, or sticks. Of course, this was not the case in eighteenth-century Mexico.
LAZARTE: Artists are going to apothecaries. They are, uh, you know, actually using materials that are also used in medicine.
DUNGY: We wanted to know more about what the process might have been like for Juan Correa. Shopping for the raw ingredients of paint and carefully considering how those raw ingredients are put together.
[SUBWAY TURNSTILE BEEP]
So we took the subway down to Kremer Pigments in New York City where Roger Carmona teaches a class…
ROGER CARMONA: What is paint?
DUNGY: To learn how to make oil paint from scratch.
CARMONA: Paint is pigment and binder.
DUNGY: Pigment is color, usually a powder, and binders are the glue that hold pigments together and adhere them to the surface of the paintings. Egg yolks, wax, polymers are all examples of binding agents used in fine art.
But you know why we’re here…we’re here for the oils.
CARMONA: The four main oils that artists have been using have been linseed oil, walnut oil, poppy seed oil, and safflower oil. Linseed oil tends to be the thickest.
DUNGY: Making paint is like making pasta, a mound of flour or pigment, and a depression in the center, where the egg would go.
CARMONA: So once you have the little mound, then we're going to use Swedish cold pressed linseed oil.
DUNGY: From this simple recipe an art tradition was born. Using linseed oil as a paint binder allowed artists to depict light and textures and surfaces in a way that artists couldn’t before.
The shine of metals, the reflections of glass, the sparkle of crystal, the crush of velvet. When you stand at the top of the top of the stairs at The Met and you see the “Old Masters” of European painting, what you also see is linseed oil’s victory and by extension, Europe’s dominance.
But…what if…artists in Mexico had a similar, perhaps even superior, recipe for oil painting, using ingredients local to them?
LAZARTE: The first time I became aware of chia is through an article that was published by my colleagues in Mexico, Elsa Arroyo and Pablo Amador, about the materials and techniques of the artist Juan Correa.
DUNGY: The article that focused on the shopping list that mentioned more than twelve liters of chia oil.
LAZARTE: Once I read that, I felt, you know, that, wow,
DUNGY: Because chia oil? Used by a painter?
LAZARTE: This is a material that I had not heard before.
DUNGY: José was stumped. And so he turned to someone at The Met who gets these questions all the time.
JULIE ARSLANOGLU: Any question that raises more questions is a lot of fun.
DUNGY: This is Julie Arslanoglu.
ARSLANOGLU: I'm a research scientist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
DUNGY: As a scientist, she lives for such questions. They’re a call to action.
ARSLANOGLU: I describe it as detective work.
DUNGY: So great, chia oil on this shopping list looks really interesting. Can we test to see if he was using chia oil in a painting?
ARSLANOGLU: My first response was, tragically, no. What we traditionally use for analysis for oils is something called fatty acid analysis.
DUNGY: Fatty acid analysis, as the name suggests, is the study of oils and fats. It existed for a long time in chemistry and life sciences, and it came into use in museums in the late sixties and early seventies to distinguish things like egg as a binder from oil as a binder in painting.
ARSLANOGLU: And that holds up really well for Western art where linseed oil, poppy oil, and walnut oil were the dominant oils that were used in painting. And scientists all over the world for decades have been using this type of approach to identify oils in paintings and other artworks.
DUNGY: But there was an issue with chia oil.
ARSLANOGLU: We found that the fatty acid ratios that we could expect for chia oil were likely to be very similar to linseed oil.
DUNGY: The oils are almost identical. Let me explain this in a different way…pretend it is 1980. You’re a conservator starting a new job at a big museum with a broad collection…
MONICA KATZ: If you went to any encyclopedic museum, you would be presented by, first and foremost, their “Old Masters.” That's what you would see first.
So, if they were going to do any work on anything, it was going to be on that body of work. So, the, uh, reference samples and the baselines that we have to work with as conservators, historically, are all European materials. And, typically, when you hit a material that isn't a European material, you can't go any further because there's nothing else, you can't compare it.
DUNGY: As conservation grew up, became a field, moved into museums, it kept European oil painting at the center, and the field grew up around it. And so more often than not, linseed oil was the center of attention.
And since the tests can’t tell the difference between chia oil and linseed oil, if you see an oil painting made in the style of Europe’s “Old Masters,” you don’t have much choice but to assume it was made using linseed oil.
ARSLANOGLU: For years now, I've been trying to change the way that we approach problems that we think we've got it all figured out. And this is especially true for materials that come from parts of the world that we haven't studied as intensely.
DUNGY: Like José and Monica, Julie is a student of the linseed oil school of conservation.
ARSLANOGLU: You know, the prospect that chia oil could have different requirements for conservation or treatment, that's exciting and scary at the same time, because there has been so much work done on linseed oil and it's so well studied that to even scratch the surface on whether chia is similar to or not similar to linseed is, um, daunting.
DUNGY: But the question about chia oil got her wondering—what if this was a chance to reorient the entire field?
JAMIE YORK (Producer): What difference does it make that you get to focus on this tradition that hasn't been taken as seriously or studied for as long?
ARSLANOGLU: So, it means a lot in lots of different ways. First, it means that The Met is very serious about its Latin American collection and understanding it and presenting it in the right light.
You know, our job is to inform people about what they're looking at and to help them connect it to other parts of culture, but their culture as well. And, you know, that sounds like a little bit of writing on the side of the wall next to an artwork, but a lot of work goes into that to make it true.
So, if we are able to identify unequivocally that there's chia oil in the paintings, first off, wow! You know, for the first time ever, we'll be able to say absolutely you have chia oil here because right now you can't do that.
The second thing is it will change the way that people think about how artisans in Mexico were working. And maybe we can use the chia oil as a way of demonstrating that these paintings actually are Mexican and were misattributed as Spanish.
So there is a whole new way of understanding what was happening in Mexico in terms of how art was being made and trade and possibly value.
DUNGY: José and Julie started putting together a team. They reached out to Elsa, the scholar in Mexico City who translated and published the shopping list signed by Correa. They enlisted Ronda, The Met’s curator of Latin American Art; and Monica, the objects conservator and lacquer expert from the Hispanic Society.
ARSLANOGLU: My father used to tell me that serendipity favors the prepared, meaning that your professional career is spent building the relationships that you will eventually need for something. You don't know what, but when that something comes, you'll be ready. And this time it actually happened.
DUNGY: Julie knew that typical analysis would not be able to distinguish linseed from chia oil because they were so chemically similar. But what if you could ID chia oil by its distinct molecular markers?
She enlisted partners at the University of Bordeaux, and at Weill Cornell Medical School. They could apply the tools of medical research.
ARSLANOGLU: You know, all of these proteomics, lipidomics techniques were developed for medical research. The genomics as well. And so we're tapping into something that is completely unrelated to art. Part of the fun of science is that there are always connections to something that you never thought of.
DUNGY: The chia team looked to the most cutting-edge science, they spent time searching through Spanish-language archives, and they built relationships with museums in Mexico who might allow them to sample artworks. People were on board, excited.
They applied for funding through the National Endowment for the Humanities. They were awarded a Research and Development grant, for scientific research and for travel to Mexico to partner with museums and artisans.
And they looked to an artwork already in The Met’s collection that very likely contained chia oil. It was the batea—that large, round, shiny, black tray that Ronda introduced us to at the beginning of the episode.
Bateas are still being made, maybe in ways that haven’t changed much since the 1700s. If the team could go to Mexico, understand how chia oil works as a material, sample chia oil in The Met’s batea and compare it to samples from Juan Correa’s paintings, maybe it would be enough evidence to start connecting the dots.
RONDA KASL: The Indigenous people who continue to make this would have quite a lot to say about it because it's a living tradition.
DUNGY: Up next: Team Chia goes to Mexico and we ride along.
[MUSIC]
—
DUNGY: Before we left for Mexico, we asked Julie what she was hoping for:
ARSLANOGLU: What I really want to get from Mexico is actually see the artisans process the seeds and then see how they make the lacquer, you know, to mix with the pigments, but then to actually apply it.
If we can make our system work on a lacquerware sample, we have a much higher probability of having it work on a paint sample.
MARIO GASPAR: Sí, rápido.
LAZARTE: ¿Y cuánto necesitas, cuántos kilos de semillas necesitas para un…?
GASPAR: Para un litro, más o menos unos dieciocho kilos.
DUNGY: A few months later Team Chia headed to Mexico. After a six-hour drive from Mexico City that climbed higher and higher into the mountains, we reached the town of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, a small town with a grid of cobblestone streets at its center. Pátzcuaro is known for its Day of the Dead celebrations and its lacquerware. Lacquered skulls with brightly painted floral designs are for sale at the dozens of roadside stands that surround the town square.
Our destination is just off the main square, a place called La Casa de los Once Patios—or The House of Eleven Patios—which is a maze of shops and stairs, and courtyards filled with plants and flowers. We are here to find the studio of master batea maker, Mario Gaspar.
He is a third generation artist and craftsman. And this is one of the places where chia oil is still used to make lacquerware in the same way it has been done for centuries.
Mario Gaspar in his studio in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán with Team Chia
GASPAR: …más o menos unos dieciocho kilos.
LAZARTE: Wow. Bastante.
GASPAR: Sí.
LAZARTE: [To Team Chia] Eighteen kilos of seed to make one liter of oil.
GASPAR: Y depende mucho si la semilla es ya muy vieja, van estar porque va a salir menos aceite, si la semilla recién cosechada, sale más aceite.
DUNGY: José is translating while we all gather around and observe how a lacquerware object is made. How it has been made for generations. It’s a chance for everyone to ask really practical questions about chia oil, how it's prepared and how it’s used, to make that glossy surface of a batea. It’s a step-by-step process that this group hasn’t been able to ask about before.
ARSLANOGLU: We just discussed with him how he made the oil, so we know exactly how he's done it. We know it's been boiled in copper, which we didn't know before. And so then, um, we know every step in the process of the chia oil. And now he tells us that he has the aje, and he makes that, um, the mixture of the aje and chia together. So this is a perfect reference material.
Mario Gaspar demonstrates how he coats a batea in lacquer with his hands to José Lazarte. Gaspar often rubs the lacquer into the wood until his hands bleed
DUNGY: With what Team Chia is learning, and the many samples they’ve gathered here, they will go back to The Met, back to their batea, and really dial in the analysis.
ARSLANOGLU: So it's exciting.
KATZ: [To Mario Gaspar] Is this what in the documents they describe as dolamitas?
LAZARTE: [To Mario Gaspar] ¿Dolamitas?
GASPAR: No sé, yo imagino que sí. ¿Quién sabe? Sí, el cuerpo es, es muy duro. Entonces, todo eso no lo tiramos. Lo aprovechamos.
LAZARTE: [To Team Chia] So to make the blacks, he actually uses ashes.
KATZ: Ah!
DUNGY: Watching Mario demonstrate how he applies the chia oil and aje paste onto the batea to build up the lacquered surface, Monica can also see the strands of this project coming together.
Beatriz Ortega paints a small decorative plate in the studio she shares with her husband, Mario Gaspar
KATZ: If you identify the materials properly, you have to just work out how the ingredients got into the object.
DUNGY: As the group finishes furiously taking notes it’s clear that they’ve learned a ton, just in a few hours, that they did not know before.
And as they digest what they’ve heard and pack up their samples to fly home to New York, it feels like they’ve got one more level of information. This is how we learn things. People turn their attention to something, and if they’re interested enough that makes it important. We’ve been doing this for centuries with linseed oil and the paintings made from it. Chia is a new door. It’s exciting and a little scary and…
ARSLANOGLU: It’s also humbling from a scientific point of view because you can't predict what it's going to be.
DUNGY: Julie knows it’s early days, but they’re trying. And with every step they’re seeing a little more clearly, paying closer attention. Because part of the drive for a project like this is in the dreaming—what if? What if it could…
ARSLANOGLU: Change the way that people think about how artisans in Mexico were working. And what could be absolutely fantastic is if we're able to identify it in, we're targeting one particular artist, Juan Correa, because of a shopping list that was translated and he was a painter, not a painter who also did lacquerware, but a painter and a famous painter. So if we can identify, let's say, chia oil in his artworks, and in our paintings, one of which is a contemporary of Correa, we can look at Correa's immediate surrounding people. Was it just Correa's workshop? Was everybody doing it?
DUNGY: Or maybe the story is about the ingenuity of Indigenous artists…
KASL: The technique was unknown to Europeans and it was unknowable by Europeans. That it derived from Indigenous knowledge of nature and the properties of materials. The Spaniards considered them to be ingenious, not because they mastered European techniques, which they did, but because they, they invented entirely new, unknown ones.
DUNGY: Elsa, the professor in Mexico City who published the list that started this journey also doesn’t know where this is heading, but she agrees, it’s already forming new stories where new places are at the center…
ARROYO: If you create knowledge based on the historical sources, you have few for this part of the globe. But if you consider as your sources also objects, also traditions, materials, you have a wide panorama for weaving a new story.
DUNGY: What if chia oil can tell a new story of Mexico? What if it just made us pay attention to Mexico for a while? What if Mexico’s influence was the one that spread, what if chia oil migrated to Europe and it wasn’t just linseed oil that traveled? What if reviving the history of chia oil and Mexican art can rectify even a small part of what was lost during the conquest of Mexico? Who knows what that might unlock and reveal, how it might change our priorities, our understanding.
ARROYO: This kind of research are going to have a big impact in the knowledge of the history of the artistic techniques all around the world. Because if you consider art history and these big narratives on how painting has been made since antiquity to the contemporary time, this history is structured over the line of European materials. And I think this new line of research that are trying to trace the use of local materials, you are going to create a new way of thinking, more inclusive, with different perspectives, without this colonial view, and to generate new knowledge.
Yeah, for me, chia oil is like a ghost in the paintings.
[MUSIC]
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DUNGY: Immaterial is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise.
Our production staff includes Salman Ahad Khan, Ann Collins, Samantha Henig, Eric Nuzum, Emma Vecchione, Sarah Wambold, and Jamie York.
Additional staff includes Laura Barth, Julia Bordelon, Skyla Choi, Maria Kozanecka, and Rachel Smith.
This season would not be possible without Andrea Bayer, Inka Drögemüller, and Douglas Hegley.
Sound design by Ariana Martinez and Kristin Mueller.
This episode includes original music composed by Austin Fisher.
Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Claire Hyman.
Special thanks to Adwoa Gyimyah-Brempong.
Immaterial is made possible by Dasha Zhukova Niarchos. Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund.
This episode would not have been possible without Associate Conservator José Luis Lazarte Luna, Curator Ronda Kasl, Scientist Julie Arslanoglu, Monica Katz, Elsa Arroyo, Roger Danila Carmona, and Mario Gaspar.
And special thanks to Aleks Popowich, Alfonso Miranda Marquez, Beatriz Ortega, Marco Leona, and Avery Trufelman.
To see images of the artworks featured in this episode, visit The Met’s website at metmuseum.org/immaterialchia.
The research presented within has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
I’m your host, Camille Dungy.
