Doris Heyden was a prominent scholar of pre-Columbian

Pre-Columbian

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic period to European colonization during...

 Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...

n cultures, particularly those of central Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

. She was born in East Orange, New Jersey

East Orange, New Jersey

East Orange is a city in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census the city's population 64,270, making it the state's 20th largest municipality, having dropped 5,554 residents from its population of 69,824 in the 2000 Census, when it was the state's 14th most...

, United States. She died on September 25, 2005 from the lingering after effects of a stroke

Stroke

A stroke, previously known medically as a cerebrovascular accident , is the rapidly developing loss of brain function due to disturbance in the blood supply to the brain. This can be due to ischemia caused by blockage , or a hemorrhage...

 suffered in 1999.

Heyden was a member of a group of artists, writers, folklorists, scholars, and political activists who together created the "Mexican Renaissance". The exponents of this post-Revolutionary circle drew upon Mexican history and traditions while contributing to a variety of international movements including realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

, Symbolism

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

, surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 and communism

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

. Important members were mural

Mural

A mural is any piece of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface. A particularly distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture.-History:Murals of...

 painters Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...

, Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....

, José Clemente Orozco

José Clemente Orozco

José Clemente Orozco was a Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others...

 and David Alfaro Siqueiros

David Alfaro Siqueiros

José David Alfaro Siqueiros was a social realist painter, known for his large murals in fresco that helped establish the Mexican Mural Renaissance, together with works by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, and also a member of the Mexican Communist Party who participated in an...

, Zapotec painter Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage, born in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. Tamayo was active in the mid-20th century in Mexico and New York, painting figurative abstraction with surrealist influences....

, mystical painters Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Varo Uranga in Anglès, Girona, Spain in 1908. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement...

 and Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington OBE was a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter and a novelist. She lived most of her life in Mexico City.-Early life:...

, caricaturist and Mesoamerican scholar Miguel Covarrubias

Miguel Covarrubias

José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud was a Mexican painter and caricaturist, ethnologist and art historian among other interests. In 1924 at the age of 19 he moved to New York City armed with a grant from the Mexican government, tremendous talent, but very little English speaking skill. Luckily,...

, as well as photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Manuel Álvarez Bravo was a Mexican photographer.Álvarez Bravo was born in Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He came from a family of artists and writers, and met several other prominent artists who encouraged his work when he was young, including Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera...

.

Early life

Born Doris Heydenreich Selz in 1905, Heyden claimed noble German and Austrian descent from a family with titles going back to 1312. She spent a happy and prosperous childhood in Maplewood, New Jersey

Maplewood, New Jersey

Maplewood is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the township population was 23,867.-History:...

 and Glencoe, Illinois

Glencoe, Illinois

Glencoe is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2010 census, the village population was 8,723. Glencoe is located on suburban Chicago's North Shore. Glencoe is located within the New Trier High School District. Glencoe is regarded as one of the most affluent suburbs on...

 with access to New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. Her early life was illuminated by art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

, and books. She began writing and publishing at about age ten, at first concentrating on poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 and mysteries, and then contributing to Newark, New Jersey

Newark, New Jersey

Newark is the largest city in the American state of New Jersey, and the seat of Essex County. As of the 2010 United States Census, Newark had a population of 277,140, maintaining its status as the largest municipality in New Jersey. It is the 68th largest city in the U.S...

 newspapers around age thirteen. Heyden started painting even earlier, when she was five years old. Although she never became a great artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

, she made her mark in another field.

Education

Heyden studied art history

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

 and design at New York City’s Pratt Institute

Pratt Institute

Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...

, winning Senior Honors in 1936. After graduation she did illustrations for Mademoiselle magazine. It was in New York City that she became fascinated with the drawings of José Clemente Orozco and Mexican art in general. During the mid 1940s she traveled to Mexico. A friend gave her the name of a Mexican photographer. That man was Manuel Alvarez Bravo, arguably Mexico’s greatest modernist photographer. Heyden and Alvarez Bravo married and had a son and daughter together. Mexico was Heyden’s home for the rest of her life.

Heyden began formal graduate studies at the Escuela de Antropología, part of UNAM

Unam

UNAM or UNaM may refer to:* National University of Misiones, a National University in Posadas, Argentina*National Autonomous University of Mexico , the large public autonomous university based in Mexico City...

, Mexico’s national university in 1956. She obtained her M.A. in 1969 and eventually acquired a doctorate there.

Career

Employed by INAH, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, as curator of the Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan – also written Teotihuacán, with a Spanish orthographic accent on the last syllable – is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, just 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas...

 hall at the National Museum of Anthropology, she produced well over a hundred articles, books, and translations, both scholarly and popular, on a variety of topics, but most importantly on ancient architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

, Aztec

Aztec

The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.Aztec is the...

 symbol

Symbol

A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...

ism, pre-Columbian views of what we would call nature

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

, the importance of caves to Mesomerican cosmology

Cosmology

Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...

, and Indian cultural survivals.

Major works

Heyden was a contributing editor of the influential Handbook of Latin American Studies (1961-68). All her writings were solidly based on archaeological fieldwork in many regions of Mexico. She also studied folk art

Folk art

Folk art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. In contrast to fine art, folk art is primarily utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic....

 and ethnology

Ethnology

Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...

. Research in the world’s great libraries and archives was another important aspect of her scholarship.

Until her death Doris Heyden maintained a welcoming house in Mexico City

Mexico City

Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...

, which hosted numerous gatherings of anthropologists and other internationally-renowned luminaries in her fields of study.

The influence of Doris Heyden in the field of pre-Columbian studies is evident from the two co-ordinated volumes of essays that have been dedicated to her. The first, in Spanish, is Chalchihuite edited by María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow and Beatriz Barba Ahuatzin de Piña Chan (1999). The second, in English, is the similarly titled In Chalchihuitl in quetzalli/Precious Greenstone Precious Quetzal Feather edited by Eloise Quiñones Keber

Eloise Quiñones Keber

Eloise Quiñones Keber is Professor of Art History at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Latin American art...

 (2000). The latter volume contains an interview with her.

Publications

Her published works and contributions include:

• Pre-Columbian Architecture of Mesoamerica (1975, written with Paul Gendrop and published in Spanish the previous year)
• El Ciclo de vida del pilli y del macehual (1975, The Life Cycle of Noble and Commoner)
• Economía y religion de Teotihuacan (1977)
• La comunicación no verbal en el ritual (1979)
• The Great Temple and the Aztec Gods (1984, with Luis Francisco Villaseñor)
• Cuentos del Maíz (1985)
• Mitología y simbolismo de la flora en el México prehispánico (1983), Flora y Fauna en el México Prehispánico (1988; with Ana María Velasco)
• The Eagle, the Cactus, the Rock: The Roots of Mexico Tenochtitlan’s Foundation Myth and Symbol (1989; published in Spanish the year before)
• Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España y islas de Tierra Firme (1994), a translation of Father Diego Duran
  Diego Durán
  Diego Durán was a Dominican friar best known for his authorship of one of the earliest Western books on the history and culture of the Aztecs, The History of the Indies of New Spain, a book that was much criticized in his lifetime for helping the "heathen" maintain their culture.Also known as the...
  
  ’s important sixteenth century account of the religion and customs of pre-Columbian central Mexico.