Rhizomes of Mexican American Art since 1848: An Online Portal

FAIN: PW-264041-19

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)
Karen Mary Davalos (Project Director: July 2018 to January 2026)

A planning project to develop a digital portal to information and archival sources on Mexican American art.  The activities would lay the groundwork for establishing future partnerships with small institutions and for building a database for Mexican American art nationwide.

The University of Minnesota, The University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) seek an NEH HCRR Foundations grant to undertake planning efforts for an online portal, Rhizomes of Mexican Art since 1848, that will aggregate Mexican American art and related documentation from existing digital collections across the nation. Art attributed to Mexican heritage artists living in the United States is a rich aesthetic tradition that enhances how humanities scholars think about American art, history, and culture. Co-PDs Davalos and Cortez with a team of scholars and technical specialists will convene online and in-person to produce three Foundations-level outcomes: 1) a protocol by which relevant content from small-budget institutions feed into Rhizomes; 2) a curated search strategy, new metadata, and controlled vocabularies; and 3) submission of proposals for adoption of new metadata schema by the Getty Research Institute and the NMMA.