International Symposium on 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, Mining the Archive: New Paths for Latin American/Latino Art Research, Thursday and Friday, January 19 and 20
Hosted by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Event Launches Digital Archive and Book Series of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) and the MFAH
Houston—September 22, 2011— The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and its research institute, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), host an international symposium to officially launch Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, the landmark digital archive of some 10,000 primary-source materials that will be available free of charge, worldwide. On Thursday evening, January 19, 2012, a briefing on the digital archive and preview of the first volume in the accompanying book series will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. The following day, Friday, January 20, the MFAH will host an international symposium from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.: Mining the Archive: New Paths for Latin American/Latino Art Research. Speakers will include Alejandro Anreus, art history professor at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and expert on the modern art of Latin America; Roldán Esteva-Grillet, Venezuelan historian and art critic, and author of Fuentes Documentales y Críticas de las Artes Plásticas Venezolanas: Siglos XIX y XX (2001); Ivonne Pini, author, executive editor of Art Nexus and art professor at the Universidad de los Andes and Universidad Nacional (Colombia), renowned for work in early 20th-century modernism in Colombia, Cuba and Uruguay; and Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Sheppard professor of art history at New York University (NYU) and specialist in the Art of Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Caribbean. Symposium program and additional speakers to be announced.
Registration
Registration is required, with reserved seating only. For more information, reservations, and travel information, please contact the ICAA at icaa@mfah.org or 713-353-1528.
Accommodations
Attendees may book accommodations at the Hotel Zaza Houston (www.hotelzazahouston.com or 713-526-1991), located across the street from the museum, or at The Alden Hotel (www.aldenhotels.com or 877-348-8800), 1117 Prairie Street, Houston, TX, 77002. Rooms at the Alden must be reserved by December 14, 2011.
About the Archive
The ICAA and MFAH have devoted a decade toward creating Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, and January 2012 marks a milestone for the project, with the much-anticipated resource being made available to the public for the first time. The documents in the archive have been culled by hundreds of researchers based out of 16 cities in the U.S. and throughout Latin America, and the website will launch with 2,500 documents from Argentina, Mexico and the American Midwest. Documents from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the United States will be added to the website over the next three years, with the entire selection of holdings to date available by 2015 and additional documents to be added in perpetuity. The material brings to life the ferment of international cultures, ideas and personalities that swept across 20th-century South America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and the United States. Together with the book series, the digital archive provides an unprecedented resource for the study of artistic movements in Latin America and its place in worldwide Modernism, as well as the opportunity for a broader audience to conduct new research in the field.
About the Book Series and Volume I
Accompanying the online database is an ambitious companion series of 13 annotated books, copublished by the MFAH and Yale University Press, with archive selections translated into English and organized by theme. Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?, the first volume in the book series, is published with the archive launch. Edited by Héctor Olea, Mari Carmen Ramírez and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, it traces the development of the construct of Latin American art from the 19th-century until today. Subsequent volumes will be published annually.
For more information, please contact:
MFAH Communications
713-639-7554
