The Cruz-Badiano Codex, which transmits Nahua medicinal recipes translated into Latin, was compiled in 1552 by Indigenous scholars of the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, among them the physician Martín de la Cruz and the translator Juan Badiano. It is decorated with 184 vivid illustrations of curative plants that have inspired works by the Mexican-American visual artist Blanka Amezkua. The conversation, moderated by Stephanie Reitzig (History), will consider Amezkua's works in dialogue with Nuria Galland (Director of the Museo de la Medicina Mexicana). Read about the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano here (in Spanish) and here (in English).
Blanka Amezkua is a Mexican-born artist whose work combines traditional and contemporary art practices and techniques. Her current, long-term project on the Cruz-Badiano Codex began as research in the library of the Hispanic Society in 2021 and over the course of the last several years has evolved through sustained study and development in residencies throughout New York City, in places such as Wave Hill, LMCC, Governors Island. Most recently, as the inaugural resident artist at The Puffin Foundation Brooklyn, Amezkua traced every flower and plant depicted in the Codex. Grounded in attention, reverence, and continuity, this process of repetition and close observation, translated across varied paper supports, textiles, thread, and diverse mark-making tools, reactivated these historical illustrations as living forms of inquiry.
Nuria Galland Camacho is an art historian who has taught at the Ibero-American University (UIA) and the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology (ITAM) and has participated as a curator in national and international exhibitions dedicated to art and medical sciences. She is Director of the Museum of Mexican Medicine (located in Palace of the Inquisition) at the School of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Under her coordination, the Faculty of Medicine has published titles aimed at disseminating the history of medicine in Mexico, including the Libellus de Medicinalibus indorum herbis, The Rervm medicarvm Novæ Hispania thesavrvs. Sev plantarvm animalivm mineralivm mexicanorvm historia by Francisco Hernández de Toledo, and Times of Inquisition, all them awarded the Premio Antonio García Cubas, in 2023, 2024 and 2025, by the Secretariat of Culture, through the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
Stephanie Reitzig is a PhD student in History at Columbia University. She specializes in early modern history of science, with a focus on the intersections of art, gender, and natural history in seventeenth and eighteenth-century central and northern Europe. She has previously written on the artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), who traveled to Dutch colonial Suriname from 1699-1701 to paint its flora and fauna.
