Monday, November 9, 2015

Current Awareness Blog Post

For the purposes of this assignment, I chose to be an art librarian in a large museum, writing a letter to a new curator who specializes in Latin American Art.
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November 9, 2015

Ms. Amelia Jones,

As the Head Librarian here at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, I would like to congratulate you on becoming our newest curator. Since you specialize in Latin American art from the 19th and 20th centuries, I thought I would take the initiative and provide you with a list of resources you might find helpful. The resources listed below provide a general overview and highlight current issues in the world of Latin American art, but if you ever need help on a more specific topic for a future exhibition, please let me know and I will be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Donna Marchessault  


ARCHIVES

This archive houses over 150 collections from artists, art critics, writers, gallery records, artist files, art historians, and curators of Latin American art. All of their finding aids are available online, and while only a few of the collections have been digitalized, a majority of them are on microfilm and are available through interlibrary loan.

Supported by the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, this is an ongoing project to create a digital archive to address the lack of primary sources available on Latin American art. Currently the archive houses almost 7,000 digital records from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Latino USA and covers such topics as artistic movements and writings by artists, critics, and curators. The archive is completely open to the public.


ARTIST AND GALLERY LISTINGS

Art-Collecting.com is an online resource that provides gallery guides and listings of art services, museums, and non-profit art organizations so as to showcase information on the collection, buying, and selling of visual art. They have over 4000 gallery guides with a special section on Latin American art galleries. It includes galleries from Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela, to name a few. Additionally, they provide resources in the form of links to a variety of art fairs, articles, books, blogs, and magazines on Latin American art.  

This site is committed to promoting Latin American art through the listing of artists, galleries, museums, auction houses, and exhibitions. They have over 6,000 artists on their site and provide a brief biography on each as well as images of all their know works and current exhibitions. Their lists of galleries and museums total almost 13,000 and are located all over the globe. 


BLOGS AND COLLABORATIVE WEBSITES

Artstor, a nonprofit with a mission to use digital images and media to enhance scholarship and education, runs a blog in order to highlight new additions to their services. While this blog deals with fine art in general, one can search the blog by category, in this case Latin American art, to find a virtual treasure trove of information. 

CPPC is a foundation that was founded in the 1970s that hopes to nurture an international dialogue about Latin American art and ideas. They highlight various exhibitions and publications, while providing grants for research and artist production. Additionally, the site is specifically designed to create a live online community for discussion and reflection on Latin American art. To this end, they host live debates. The two most recent debates were: "Does the Public have a Right to Culture?" and "The Tropical: Resistance or Cultural Tourism?"


PUBLICATIONS

Arte al Día is a bilingual quarterly magazine that features profiles on current artists, reviews of current exhibitions on Latin American art worldwide, and interviews from both curators and collectors of Latin American art. They are currently on issue 149, and their website has digital copies of the magazine since their July 2001 edition. Also on their website are a current news blog and videos of some of the exhibitions featured in their articles. 

Universes in Universe, or UiU, proclaims itself to be one of the oldest and most well-known art websites in the world.  UiU was developed by Gerhard Haupt, a German curator and art critic, and focuses on bringing attention to art from Latin American, Asia and Africa. They publish reviews on current exhibitions from around the world, an online magazine, and guides to the 'art world' for various international cities. 


INDEXES AND DATABASES

HAPI is an index of scholarly journals from Latin American and the Caribbean dealing with a variety of issues including the arts and humanities. They have over 380 current journals and access to over 675 out of print journals dating back to the 1970s. While this is a paid service, they do offer a free trial. 

Redalyc, which stands for Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal or the Network of Scientific Journals of Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal is an open access journal and article database with access to over 100 journals on the Arts and Humanities. 

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