Cracking Cosmic Color Codes: The White Shaman Mural

The Wednesday Evening Color Salons are a public speaker series presented as part of The New Color, a course taught by Luanne Stovall, artist and color theorist. Each salon will pair a guest speaker with a color-focused topic. On April 24, the salon series welcomes Texas State University Archeologist and Founder of Shumla Archeological Research and Education Center, Carolyn Boyd. 

For the finale of our spring guest speaker series, we are delighted to host an authentic 'Rock Star'! Join us for a journey through one of the most spectacularly complex, colorful and enduring rock art murals of the ancient world. Drawing on archeological research Carolyn Boyd cracks ancient color codes to reveal one of the oldest pictorial creation narratives in North America - a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time. Here, the color palette and graphic vocabulary are rigorously designed to communicate multiple levels of meaning vital to this cosmic worldview.

Carolyn Boyd, B.A. and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, is an artist, archaeologist, and Shumla Endowed Professor in the Department of Anthrology at Texas State University. Her primary interest is the documentation and interpretation of Pecos River Style rock art in southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico. Dr. Boyd's research examines the role of hunter-gatherer artists as active participants in the social, economic, and ideological fabric of the community and the function of art as communication and a mechanism for social and environmental adaptation. She is the founder of the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center, a nonprofit corporation with a mission to prehistoric art of the Lower Pecos. Dr. Boyd is the author of Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, and The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative, winner of the 2017 Society for American Archaeology Scholarly Book Award. She has been published in numerous peer reviewed journals including Antiquity, American Antiquity, Latin American Antiquity, Archaeometry and has contributed chapters in several edited volumes.