Classic Maya Ceramics with Glyphs at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Our Corpus Volume 19 is an interesting departure from previous corpora. In 2025, Dr. Diana Magaloni curated an exhibition at LACMA on Mesoamerican color, which is her specialty and field of expertise. When I visited this show last year, I saw several remarkable Maya ceramics with glyphs that I knew epigraphers worldwide would love to see. Although shooting conditions were not ideal, using different lengths of lenses and a good quality Nikon camera (d850) I was able to capture almost 100% of the pieces with hieroglyphs.
Working with my design guru here at Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies (CtMS), we were able to remove much of the distortion and skewing and to smooth out the uneven lighting that is inevitable when shooting into museum cases. In a few examples we did not quite get the 100% rollout on cylindrical pots that would be ideal, but in most cases we succeeded, and we have displayed closeups of glyph bands for Mayanists everywhere to scrutinize.
We are grateful to Ms. Piper Wynn Severance, Senior Manager of Rights and Reproductions at LACMA, for permission to publish these pieces.
-Bruce Love
Photographs by Bruce Love; post-production image processing by James Neely.
Display Case Key 1–5
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 3 Glyph Detail
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Image 5
Display Case Key 6
Image 6
Image 6 Glyph Detail
Display Case Key 7
Image 7
Image 7 Glyph Detail
Display Case Key 8–9
Image 8
Image 8 Glyph Detail
Image 9
Display Case Key 10–12
Image 10
Image 10 Glyph Detail
Image 11
Image 12
Display Case Key 13
Image 13
Image 13 Glyph Detail
Display Case Key 14–16
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Display Case Key 17–20
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Image 19
Image 20
Display Case Key 21
Image 21 Top Medallion and Detail Showing Depth of Relief
Image 21 Incised Side Medallions
Suggested Citation: Love, Bruce. “Corpus Volume 19: Classic Maya Ceramics with Glyphs at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).” Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies, April 28, 2026. https://brucelove.com/corpus/corpus-volume-019/.
Downloadable PDF: CtMS_Corpus_V019_Classic-Maya-Ceramics-Glyphs_LACMA
The corpus photographs and drawings may be freely used and distributed in non-commercial use and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies 