“Entre Las Aguas (Between the Waters): Tracing Spatial Journeys in the Latin American & Latinx Collection of the NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida” is a project authored by Diana Blanco, Aina Soley i Mateu, and Chase Caldwell Smith for the course “Geospatial Humanities: Digital Mapping and Critical GIS” at the University of California Los Angeles in Fall 2021, taught by Professor Wendy Perla Kurtz. The inspiration for the project’s name comes both from the title of the cover image art piece itself, María Magdalena Campos-Pons‘ De Las Dos Aguas (Of The Two Waters), 2007, and also from the journeys that the artists we trace have gone on, between islands, from islands to mainland, and across oceans.
The aim of this project is to use GIS to spatially trace the stories of artists in the Latin American & Latinx Collection of the NSU Art Museum, which has the largest collection of art produced by Cuban-born artists in the United States. The project addresses the question of how art is classified based on the geographic locations linked to artists (both where they were born and where they live and work), as well as an internal need for NSU to understand its own collection to continue building upon it. In turn, we hope that our geographic analysis will provide a further case study in efforts to make comparisons across museum collections. In other words, our work for this project makes available another data set that can then be compared with other museum datasets, facilitating broader comparative studies across museums. In sum, our project will shed light on overlooked artistic ratios across categories such as gender and geographic country of origin. This will be of particular interest to students, museum professionals, and academics working with modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art.
