by Jon Lackman | 28 September 2010 | Americas, Modern
On The Atlantic‘s website, William Haseltine transcribes a recent talk by Museum of Fine Arts Houston curator Mari Carmen Ramirez:
The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is a unique resource center for the study of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. Established in 2001 … The ICAA’s signature initiative is [a] web-based digital archive – which is scheduled to launch in the Fall of 2011 … We have established regional centers for the study of Latin American Art in 10 cities … In each location we recover documents, scan and digitize them, catalogue and annotate them … At present we have over 100 researchers … [W]e will have a collection of over 10,000 critical documents and more than 55,000 related images. We are committed to continue to expand this archive which, in theory at least, is limitless …
Q[uestion from the audience]: Have we transcended the need for Latin American Specialists?
MCR: Absolutely not. Latin American Art is now mainstream yet there are still huge gaps in our understanding … The field has grown horizontally yet lacks depth … A persistent issue in the field is that Latin American art has traditionally been considered to be derivative …. Since the early 20th century, Latin American artists have engaged in original research [and] in many cases have anticipated important developments in Europe and the United States. To understand these developments we need to get roots of this art and understand its development in depth. This can only be done through key writings and other documentation that shed light on the intellectual process that nurtured the art. This is the ultimate goal of the ICAA Documents project.
