IMAGINARTE

Interpreting and Re-Imagining Chican@ Art A New Initiative in Chicana/o Art

A new multi-year project is underway in the Chicana/o visual arts, under the auspices of the UC Santa Barbara Center for Chicano Studies. This is collaboration with the UCSB Library’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), the UCSB University Art Museum, and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. The project will exploit the University Libraries’ strong holdings in Chicana/o visual arts to promote scholarly inquiry and analyses. The project will yield new interpretive texts, exhibitions, publications and e-scholarship. In addition, the project will lead to improved documentation and contextualization of visual arts materials in the CEMA collections. These rare archival materials have for many years supported the University’s teaching curricula and various research initiatives as well as international interests.

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. Teaching, research and nationally touring exhibitions and publications related to Chicano art have all escalated. Locally, the UCSB Library CEMA maintains a world-class cultural and scholarly resource in Chicano visual arts through its archives and manuscript holdings. Its forty-two collections in this field are of national and international historic and artistic significance. The UCSB Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies, through Dr. Guisela Latorre, Dr. Maria Herrera-Sobek and other faculty, have interpreted, articulated and promoted new scholarship, visibility and public discourse of Chicana/o visual arts. The Center for Chicano Studies under the leadership of Dr. Carl Gutierrez-Jones launched a very successful related project The Dynamics of Chicana/o Cultural Literacy and Dr. Carlos Morton’s Arte initiative is experimenting with innovative ways of introducing the Chicana/o arts to the community at large.

A considerable investment has been made to acquire, process, and make these valuable materials accessible. Collections analysis has been brought to bear primarily through the means of finding aids to the collections. Recent initiatives to improve accessibility include the UC California Digital Library’s California Cultures Project, through which CEMA is making many thousands of digitized visual arts materials broadly accessible via the Internet. Much work remains to be done, especially in the area of documentation of works lacking identifications and context.

Most recently, some important new projects are bringing greater attention to the historical contributions of Chicano/Latino artists, such as the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center’s artist monograph publications series A Ver: Revisioning Art History. Imaginarte will complement such initiatives through corollary exhibits and the publication of exhibit catalogs with interpretive texts focusing on individual artists whose papers are housed in CEMA. It is also an aim of Imaginarte to encourage scholars to explore the CEMA collections to foment new readings, interpretations, conceptions and discourses that will enlighten and inform. The first to arrive was San Francisco based Yolanda Lopez who was in residence at UCSB from May 21 to June 16, 2007.

The project will offer the following components:

Exhibitions at UCSB, in the community, as well as online virtual exhibits to focus on the work of various artist subjects whose collections are housed in CEMA. The University Art Museum is an important institutional partner, having organized a three-year nationally touring exhibition on Chicano graphic art and published a seminal interpretive exhibition catalog, largely based on CEMA’s permanent collections of graphic art.

Exhibition catalogs with interpretive texts on each collection donor artist. A visiting artist role by each collection donor artist that may include any of the following: public lectures, classroom presentations, assistance with CEMA collection augmentation and documentation.

Sponsorship of one or more of the artist monographs of above subjects to be published through the UCSB Center for Chicano Studies.

Colloquia and symposia with invited artists and scholars.

A series of fellowships to visiting artist/scholars who will come to UCSB to use the library collections in Chicano visual and cultural arts and write new texts. Fellowships could be from one to nine months in duration, depending upon the specific project to be accomplished. These papers will be published in electronic form through UC CDL’s eScholarship. Recipients will also assist with any of the following as appropriate:

collections documentation/interpretation;

participate in curatorial process of the exhibitions;

teach a course in Chicana/o art or give public lectures to the campus community;

engage in community outreach functions such as presentations to local schools, tours of the exhibits for local area school and non-profit groups;

develop K-12 pedagogical teaching tools (creating lesson plans for visual and cultural literacy using archival materials).
Publicity/information materials about the visual arts collections and about this new initiative, for promotion of the project and to attract artists and scholars.

Create a dedicated website with interactive media.

Project Director: Dr. Maria Herrera-Sobek
Project Co-Director: Salvador Güereña

UCSB Working Group on Chicano Visual Arts
Salvador Güereña
Dr. Carl Gutierrez-Jones
Dr. Maria Herrera-Sobek
Dr. George Lipsitz
Dr. Carlos Morton