The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College presents the exhibition René Treviño: Stab of Guilt. The artist’s first museum survey features nearly 200 works from 2008 to the present, including new work created on the occasion of this exhibition.

René Treviño: Stab of Guilt brings together an exuberant selection of works with wide-ranging themes that illuminate the artist’s colorful and complex aesthetic. Treviño’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses a range of mediums and reflects personal inspirations as well as the artist’s research into Maya and Aztec history, Catholic symbolism, astronomy, pop culture, and queer theory to recast his heritage and identity in a new light.

Recent explorations into sculpture have resulted in a suite of three courtly robes embellished with faux jaguar fur and sequined patches, displayed with Aztec-inspired feather headdresses and presented on a custom-built stage. Titled Regalia, Intuition; Regalia, Premonition; Regalia, Foresight, the work intentionally blurs the line between high and low, craft and fine art, history and popular culture. Two sets of custom-designed papel picado, the traditional Mexican craft of cut or punched paper, are strung throughout the galleries.

Also debuting in Stab of Guilt are 20 mixed-media collages collectively titled Sunspots by Day, Asteroids by Night (2023), which incorporate imagery from 19th-century star charts made by C. H. F. Peters, who was Hamilton College’s first professor of astronomy from 1858 until his death in 1890. The series builds upon paintings in which Treviño merges historical Western views of the heavens with scientific perspectives of the Maya and Aztecs and his own idiosyncratic naming conventions in the Celestial Body-ody-ody series (2020–23).

Other works on view include the Circumference series (2019–23), a grid of 119 paintings comprised of circular imagery that, taken together, point to our commonalities across geography and cultures — ancient Aztec glyphs sit comfortably next to depictions of Greek pottery and Indigenous American folk art — as well as embellished paintings on leather, based on ancient codices and featuring a mashup of queer and Mesoamerican imagery.