Aficionados of the Latino arts may now enjoy close to 8,000 digital cultural and visual arts images for online viewing through the California Digital Library. Please visit Calisphere, a free website that offers educators, students, and the public, access to images documents and other primary resource materials from the libraries and museums of the UC campus and cultural heritage organisations across California. This new visual arts resource is available following completion of a multi-year project of California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. The digital materials and their descriptions will be of great value to schoolteachers and their students and to scholars and researchers studying Chicano/Latino cultural and visual arts. This new resource includes many works of art such as paintings, murals, art prints, sculptures, drawings and installations. In addition, students of Latino culture and society will also find thousands of images of Latino cultural arts phenomena such as community processions, indigenous and folkloric dances and other types of performing arts as well as conceptual art.

Chicano visual art is a field of significant and growing interest within the University of California and among the general public. Chicana/o aesthetic and cultural studies increasingly address interdisciplinarity and hybridity in visual arts, performing arts, and literature, examining the interplay of many types of Chicana/o cultural expression. Nowhere is this represented better than in CEMA’s growing collections in Chicano and Latino art and society.

CEMA is recognized as a major repository for Chicano visual arts collections, representing the archives of prominent Chicano/Latino art cultural centers and the collections of individual artists based in California.  Its manycollections in this field have been described as a national and international resource. CEMA’s web site, called Cemaweb, attracts close to One Million page views per year by online visitors, especially to its Chicano art digital collection. Up to now ithas been limited to 1,400 selected digital images and their descriptions, organized according to a taxonomy for classifying Chicano visual art. Various catalogs and finding to these materials have been accessible online through Cemaweb and the Online Archive of California.

A $100,000 grant from the California Digital Library enabled CEMA to ramp up its digital resource to close to 8,000 images and to make them part of a UC-wide interface through a broader project of the Online Archive of California, called California Cultures. California Cultures draws on the extraordinarily rich resources of the University of California to create a digital collection documenting ethnic groups in California and the West. Its broad objective was to serve the needs of educators, students and the general public by building an online research collection of primary resources comprised of digital images and electronic texts. These are to serve as the basis for historical studies, analysis, interpretation and application to current events.

The staff of CEMA’s digitizing project combed through many thousands of works of art, photographs and slides, and made representative selections of prints, photographs, slides and sketches to be digitized. These were then digitized to create digital masters as well as suites of derivatives that meet recognized digital image format standards. Each image is linked to its sub-location within the finding aid to the collection it has been drawn from. Extensive descriptive metadata was added to object-level database records using a Web-based template for each of the digital objects. An offshoot of the project was the creation of a new thesaurus of descriptors for indexing Chicano/Latino visual art. The thesaurus enabled staff to assign culturally relevant topical terms using popular vernacular as well as the more standard subject terms that describe such art. Images will be retrievable using search terms such as, “Cholos,” “Calaveras,” “Low rider bicycles,”  “Pachucos,” or “Zoot Suits.”