As LACMA prepares for the 2026 public opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, the future home of the museum’s permanent collection spanning a breadth of eras and cultures, we’re sharing 50 iconic artworks that will be on view in the building over the next 50 weeks in the series 50 for 50.
With its slender legs and smooth body, this ceramic sculpture from Colima, Mexico, depicts a Xoloitzcuintle, the breed known as the Mexican hairless dog. Similar ceramic figurines depicting dogs can be found in ancient shaft tombs all throughout Mesoamerica, particularly in the western Mexican state of Colima.
“It’s actually a Xoloitzcuintle that will guide the dead through the passages of the underworld to their final destination,” says Diana Magaloni, Deputy Director, Program Director & Dr. Virginia Fields Curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas. Numerous legends from ancient Mesoamerica suggest that such dogs were companions of the dead on their journeys crossing into the afterlife, as in the contemporary scene Cosmic Tree (Pochote) (2023) by Jesús Lozano Paredes, below.
The sculpture is currently on display in the exhibition We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art (on view through September 1, 2025), which explores the science, art, and cosmology of color in Mesoamerica. Colima dog figurines are often a reddish hue, a color intensified by red slip, a mixture of water and fine clay. Used in objects from murals to ceramic sculptures, the primordial palette of black and red imbue artworks like these with cosmic significance.