Pedro Lasch and exhibit guests at the installation of “Coatlicue & Las Meninas: The Stanford Edition” explore their reflection in the work and capture a photograph. (Photo courtesy of Pedro Lasch)
Stepping Into Art to Reflect on History: Pedro Lasch’s “Coatlicue & Las Meninas”
“People probably think that I’m obsessed with mirrors, which I kind of am,” said artist Pedro Lasch.
As a faculty member in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies with a thriving visual arts practice, Lasch has been using mirrors as a medium for more than 20 years. His most recent work, “Coatlicue & Las Meninas,” merges Diego Velázquez’s iconic painting Las Meninas (1656) and the colossal sculpture of the Aztec deity Coatlicue (1400s) onto a fabric print embedded within a smoky ten-foot black mirror. When a spectator stands before the work, an image of themselves appears — embedded alongside members of the Spanish royal court of Philip IV and the goddess Coatlicue herself — prompting viewers to contemplate histories of colonization and one’s place within them.
The work was commissioned for the Stanford/Zócalo contest, a collaboration between the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS) and Zócalo Public Square. Lasch was selected as the winner for the Southern United States, as part of a national competition of over 100 artists competing for four regional awards. During the summer of 2025, his monumental piece was on exhibit at the Asheville Art Museum, after which it will be moved to Stanford University’s permanent art collection.
As part of the exhibit, the Asheville Art Museum hosted a photo contest, inviting museum guests to submit photographs of themselves with the work. The contest was accompanied by a free, bilingual interactive community workshop led by Lasch on July 13.
Lasch compares the experience of interacting with “Coatlicue & Las Meninas” to that of a tableau vivant, a genre used before the invention of photography where people would emulate paintings and poses as a static scene for the enjoyment of an audience. “Coatlicue & Las Meninas” naturally invites audiences to become part of the work, and Lasch encourages people to not just photograph themselves with it, but to ‘stage’ something and be very deliberate.
“Velázquez’s painting is set up as a [theatrical] stage of sorts,” Lasch explains. “And it’s important to think of ‘Coatlicue & Las Meninas’ as a kind of stage as well. Where do I stand? Whom do I want to be reflected with? Where in the painting am I in relation to this Aztec sculpture and the characters from Velázquez?”
In the first half of the workshop, Lasch focused on “Coatlicue & Las Meninas,” introducing the 40 participants to some of the core ideas of the work, inviting them to look at themselves in the black mirror and consider the artwork as a portal to another world including the present, the past and imagined futures.
“As a viewer, you are literally ‘drawn’ into the composition,” said Joseph Gigliotto, an Asheville resident who volunteers as a docent at the Asheville Art Museum. “The black mirror glass dissolves the boundary between image and spectator. The experience was a little uncanny.”
Given the importance of immigration as a topic for the Stanford/Zócalo commission, Lasch decided to incorporate the “mirror masks” elements of his multi-year “Naturalizations Project” (2002) to the community workshop.
“This workshop is the first time that I’ve ever combined the ‘Black Mirror Project’ and the mirror masks, because I didn’t want people to get confused or collapse them into one thing, but it made sense to try it for this exhibit.”
The mirror masks are lightweight, rectangle-shaped mirrors that attach with a Velcro strap around one’s head with exposed slits for the eyes and mouth. The concept is that the image of another is transposed onto your body.
“Initially it's a very disconcerting experience because everybody's faces disappear,” Lasch explained. “If you are standing in front of me, and I’m wearing the mask you would see your face in my body. Once you wear it, your face disappears, and we become this kind of collective body of sorts. The primary marker of identity — the face, which indicates age, race, gender, all of these things we project onto people — is gone all of a sudden, so it opens up this space for invention and play.”
The masks also fuse the museum’s environment with the experience. “Imagine 25 people wearing a mirror mask, walking around an art gallery,” he said. “I invite people to identify an artwork from the museum that they want to see reflected on their face, an artwork that they feel a strong connection to.”
The participants then worked in pairs to capture photographs that reflect the mask-wearer within an artwork. This interactive activity allowed participants not only to engage with the museum’s collection but also with each other.
“To do this activity, you need a photographer to cue you on how and where to stand — turn a little bit to the left or right, look up or down — and then the concept of authorship becomes necessarily collaborative,” Lasch said. “Participants generally feel that the exercise allows them to connect in much deeper ways with the artwork, because it requires them to search for what connects them to art, not just artistically, but psychologically.”
“Coatlicue & Las Meninas: The Stanford Edition” is on display at the Asheville Art Museum until August 17. In early May 2025, the exhibit's opening was honored with an evening of art and conversation, featuring New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah, scholars, policymakers and community leaders, all exploring ideas of how migration shapes America's future. Over 300 people were in attendance. To learn more about that event visit: Zócalo Public Square: How Do We See Ourselves?
