Happy Anniversary! ICAA’s Documents Project Website Celebrates Four Years January 11, 2016

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The website Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art  launched on January 20, 2012, after 10 years of quiet, behind-the-scenes work at the Museum’s International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA).

It’s hard to believe that four years have passed since we initially made 2,500 documents from Argentina, Mexico, and the American Midwest available online. Since its public launch, the Documents Project website has had more than 325,000 visits by some 225,000 unique visitors, averaging nearly 7,000 visits per month. As of December 2015, the site boasted 15,500 registered users who actively access materials, and create and share their own personal collections of documents on the site.

The portal has had a transformational impact on the field of Latin American and Latino visual culture, becoming the principal source for research materials from this emergent field.

Over these past four years, the ICAA’s Houston-based team has processed and uploaded more than 4,500 additional documents from places including Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico,  and Venezuela, submitted by an extensive network of scholars that includes Carmen María Jaramillo and her team at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá; Ana Maria Belluzzo and researchers from FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo); researchers María Elena Huizi and Josefina Manrique, both based out of Banco Mercantil in Caracas; as well as Flavia Marichal Lugo at the University of Puerto Rico Museum in San Juan; and Yasmin Ramirez from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

This network complements the work of the central team in Houston, which has added significant materials on Antonio Berni, Gego, and Gyula Kosice’s Hydrospatial City (1948), as well as documents from the Adolpho Leirner Archives.

Every one of the 7,000 (and counting) primary texts now available on our site reflects a fundamental spirit of camaraderie and a commitment to a team-based approach that, together, define the core values of the ICAA’s Documents Project.