Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Launches World's Most Comprehensive Digital Archive of Latin American and Latino Art

The new digital archive becomes available tomorrow (Thursday, Jan. 19, 2011).
From Culture Map Houston:

After a decade of culling historical material from across North and South America, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and its research institute, International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), will launch its long-awaited digital archive of Latin American and Latino art on Thursday.
The centerpiece of a $50 million initiative that began in 2001 to expand the museum’s 20th-century Latin American art, the new online collection offers an array of primary-source material — including artists’ writings and correspondence as well as other textual material from period journals and newspapers — all brought together for the first time in a free searchable database.
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Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, as the online archive is known officially, begins with a look at 2,500 documents from Argentina and Mexico as well as the American Midwest. The Midwest is an area rich in groundbreaking Chicano art, yet, like many regions of the United States, it’s often not included in broader studies of Latin American art.
To accompany the online archive, the MFAH and Yale University Press will publish a series of 13 books throughout the next decade featuring selections from the digital collection, many of which will be published for the first time in English. The first volume, Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino? will be available in the coming weeks.

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