To Capture the Sun

"Metallurgy in gold developed into a high art form in the Gran Coclé during the centuries leading up to European contact. For indigeous people of the Americas, gold was not primarily an expression of social position or an index to commercial wealth but a luminous token of the relationship between the human and metaphysical worlds. Europeans desired the shiny metal as a route to power and riches. In the rush to acquire gold for its monetary value, they confiscated untold numbers of culturally meaningful and artfully wrought gold objects and melted them into ingots for shipment to Europe. Today only a small fraction survives of the vast stores of metallurgical artifacts encountered by the first Europeans who reached the western hemisphere. In the 1940s, Thomas Gilcrease acquired a significant collection of gold artifacts and related zoomorphic ceramic and other items from the Gran Coclé.... For Gilcrease, these objects symbolized the height of cultural achievement in the Americas before European contact"--Book jacket front flap.

"To Capture the Sun: Gold of Ancient Panama explores Gilcrease Museum's unique holding of pre-Columbian gold and related ritual ceramics in the largest display of these objects since their acquisition by Thomas Gilcrease in the 1940s. The exhibition, which runs through January 15, 2012 in the Getty Gallery, showcases artifacts originally used in the ritual practices of the people of Gran Coclé [Panama]. The exhibition includes more than 200 items – gold artifacts used as personal adornments and symbols of authority for social, political, and religious elites. A portion of the exhibit examines the rise of metallurgy in the Western Hemisphere and the role that the creation and use of gold ornaments played in the complex cultural networks of early central Panama"--Thomas Gilcrease Museum website.