Credit: Richard Duardo, "Announcement poster for professional musicians program 1978"

ImaginArte: Interpreting and
Re-imagining Chican@ Art

Imaginarte Web Site

ImaginArte is the name for an exciting new interdisciplinary humanities project that will draw on CEMA collections to foment new research, scholarship, exhibitions and publications. Its overall goal is to support new interdisciplinary scholarship, research, exhibitions, publications, and greater online access to the visual legacy of the Chicano movement. An interesting twist to this new project is that it is a multi-institutional campus partnership. Not only will scholars, educators, and students be able to benefit, but it will eventually also provide unique information resources that will be useful to public teachers and their students in the K-16 school settings.

The development team for ImaginArte is the UCSB Faculty Working Group on Chicano Visual Arts. Partnering in this project are four campus institutions: the Center for Chicano Studies, the UCSB Library’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), the University Art Museum, and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. The project aims to benefit and enhance the reach of each of the collaborators.

Project directors Dr. Maria Herrera-Sobek and Sal Güereña state that ImaginArte will exploit CEMA’s strong holdings in Chicana/o visual arts to promote scholarly inquiry and analyses. The project will produce 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.

First, the project features visiting artists in residency, already funded through an initial grant by the UCSB Center for Chicano Studies. These are artists whose papers are housed in CEMA. The first to arrive was San Francisco based Yolanda Lopez who was in residence at UCSB from May 21 to June 16, 2007. Next in line is East Los Angeles artist Leo Limon. The artists in residence will perform documentation work on their respective collections, assisting guest curators with planning exhibitions of their work. They will also give public lectures and classroom presentations, and/or write interpretive texts to be published through the project. The first three years of such residencies have been funded.

UCSB oral historian David Russell is nearing completion of what will be ImaginArte’s first book, an oral history of artist Leo Limon. Emmy Award-winning videographer Luis Fuerte has shot on-location video footage for the project to be made into a mini-documentary on the artist that will be added as streaming video to the ImaginArte web site. An interactive website is in development that will include e-exhibits, and pod casts of streaming video and audio materials emanating from the CEMA archival collections.

Another goal will be to organize a series of exhibitions; this will be done through guest curators under the direction of University Art Museum director Kathryn Kanjo. Project activities will include developing  print and electronic publications, as well as public lectures and symposia based on subjects drawn from CEMA collections. Next, the project seeks to provide a series of short-term research/writing visiting scholars fellowships that will be open competitively but will be keyed to one or more of CEMA special collections.

CEMA’s 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, CEMA maintains a world-class cultural and scholarly resource in Chicano visual arts through its extensive archives and manuscript holdings. Its forty-two collections in this field are of national and international historic and artistic significance.

According to CEMA director Sal Güereña, a considerable investment had 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. However, much work remained to be done, especially in the area of documentation of works lacking identifications and context and in teasing out new insights and new interpretive texts that will lead to a better understanding about the rich array of subjects in these collections.

The ImaginArte project is being funded through a combination of local support, extramural grants and by contributions from the four partners.

The UCSB Working Group on Chicano Visual Arts consists of the following individuals: Salvador Güereña (California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, Special Collections Department, Davidson Library); Dr. Carl Gutierrez-Jones (Center for Chicano Studies and English); Dr. Maria Herrera-Sobek (Chicana and Chicano Studies), Dr. George Lipsitz (Black Studies), Dr. Carlos Morton (Theater and Dance), and Dr. Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies).

A national advisory board advises and provides guidance to the project, including Emmy-award-winning actor and film producer Hector Elizondo, Chicano/Latino art scholar Dr. Adriana Katzew of the University of Vermont, and acclaimed playwright and Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez.

A local advisory committee includes Diana Dupont of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Miki Garcia of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and Susan Moon of the UCSB Arts Library.