Digitizing and Sharing the Art of the National Hispanic Cultural Center (New Mexico)

FAIN: PW-285132-22

National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation (Albuquerque, NM 87102-4508)
Tey Marianna Nunn (Project Director: July 2021 to July 2022)
Jadira Gurule (Project Director: July 2022 to present)

A collaborative project to digitize, describe, and make accessible a collection of Mexican American art and related documents at the National Hispanic Cultural Center for inclusion on the museum’s website and the open-source aggregating portal Rhizomes of Mexican American Art Since 1848.

The National Hispanic Cultural Center, University of Minnesota, and University of Texas Rio Grande Valley seek an NEH HCRR Implementation grant to undertake a three-year collaboration to digitize, describe, and make accessible a large concentration of Mexican American art and related documents. Building on UMN’s successful Foundations grant, we propose to digitize 3,400 works of art and 16 linear feet of archival materials from the Center’s Art Museum. The nominated materials will be published to the Center’s website and the open-source, aggregating portal, Rhizomes of Mexican American Art Since 1848, which implements culturally-informed descriptors, metadata, and search strategies discovered under the Foundations grant. Rhizomes will link relevant holdings from the nation’s libraries, archives, and museums, thereby fostering a sustainable network for digital collections of Mexican-American art and enhancing how humanities scholars think about American art, history, and culture.