ImaginArte is the name chosen 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 scholarship, research, exhibitions, publications, and greater online access to the visual legacy of the Chicano movement.

This project is a multi-institutional campus partnership involving 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. This will be of value to not only scholars, educators, and college students. It also will provide unique information resources that will be useful to public teachers and their students in K-16 school settings.

The development team for ImaginArte is the UCSB Research Working Group on Chicano Visual Arts, under the auspices of the Center for Chicano Studies. Project directors Dr. Maria Herrera-Sobek and Sal Guerena 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 Sacramento based artist Jose Montoya. 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.

(more)