Papelitos Blog

Papelitos, the ICAA blog, is an online forum for staff, student interns, fellows, and project associates to share ideas and insights into the activities and research-in-progress at the Center. We also invite proposals from artists, scholars, and researchers that engage with the role of archives and documentation in the field. If interested in contributing, please write to the ICAA’s Research Specialist, Liz Donato at edonato@mfah.org.

¡Aquí Estamos!: Latinx Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The ICAA and MFAH are working to address this absence via the ¡Aquí Estamos! Latinx Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. This multi-year, institution-wide initiative aims to transform this emergent field by opening critical pathways for the increased visibility and study of Latinx art and artists within a major encyclopedic museum.

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2023 Peter C. Marzio Award Winners Announced

Lee esta entrada en español. The ICAA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Competition for the Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research and Latin American and Latino Art. The two graduate-level winning essays will be published in a 2024 issue of Working Papers. This year’s Graduate Essay Prize was awarded to […]

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Photographs

August 19 is International Photography Day, and I photograph paper; the delicate nature of paper is incontrovertible. Paper succumbs: to ink, inadvertent mishandling, moisture, the passage of time, the voracity of insects, and—well—scissors beats paper. […]

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Pride Month Spotlight: Los Contemporáneos

The writers and artists associated with the magazine Contemporáneos, published in Mexico City from 1928 to 1931, were called a “group without a group.” Rather than adhering to specific doctrines or styles, they advocated individual expression and shared a desire to bring international, avant-garde ideas into Mexican culture. […]

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The CAYC Files: An ICAA/MFAH and ISLAA Collaboration

The CAYC Files—the first initiative organized as part of a long-term partnership between the ICAA and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York—will create the first centralized digital resource for the comprehensive study of the Buenos Aires-based Centro de Arte y Comunicación. […]

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New in the Archive: Carlos Cruz-Diez through the Decades

Selected by ICAA Director Mari Carmen Ramírez with the artist while he was still living, nearly 100 documents from the archive of the Cruz-Diez Documentation Center, in collaboration with the Cruz-Diez Foundation, will be published in the ICAA’s Documents Project this year, commemorating the centennial of the artist’s birth. […]

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2022 Peter C. Marzio Award Winners Announced

The ICAA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 competition for the Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in Latin American and Latino Art. Named for the late, longtime director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), who supported the establishment of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas […]

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Object-Based Learning Seminar Spotlight: Zoie Buske

I have had the privilege of participating in the Object-Based Learning (OBL) Latin American and Latinx art course twice, once in my undergraduate career and again in graduate school. I can, without a doubt, pinpoint this course as a turning point in my understanding of art and art history. The object-based learning methodology has also […]

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Dále Gas Turns 45

“A new era in Chicano art is beginning! ¡DÁLE GAS!” With this call to action, the artist and curator Santos Martinez Jr. heralded a historic moment. On August 20, 1977, the first major museum exhibition of Chicano art in Texas opened to the public at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Dále Gas: An Exhibition of […]

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New in the Archive: Mercedes Pardo’s Milestones

“Color is an instrument of a vast, infinite, inexhaustible range and that has been what I have expressed, what I have wanted to say in art.” – Mercedes Pardo, 1979 Mercedes Pardo (1921–2005) was a Venezuelan artist, teacher, and pioneer of abstract painting in her home country. As the writer María Ramírez Ribes describes in […]

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