Bibliographic Note: Archival Holdings and Primary Sources

Craven, David

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Bibliographic Note: Archival Holdings and Primary Sources

David Craven

Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990

Bibliographic Note

Author

David Craven

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00020.014

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15785

Bibliographic Note: Archival Holdings and Primary Sources

Mexican Art and Culture (1910–1940)

An essential starting point is the Centro Nacional de Información, Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas, or CENIDIAP, which is a key agency of the Instituto de Bellas Artes (INBA), the main ministry of culture for the visual arts within Mexico. This vast archive, now located in the Biblioteca de Bellas Artes within the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City, houses both photocopies and/or originals of primary sources about most of the main artists and institutions of the period. These sources cover los tres grandes (forty-one volumes of material on Diego Rivera alone) and members of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, such as Leopoldo Méndez or Pablo O’Higgins, and such phenomena as the Escuelas al aire libre started by Ramos Martínez. (Many of the sources about these schools have been published by Laura Matute, who works in CENIDIAP, along with Francisco Reyes Palma).

A few other archives in Mexico City are crucial starting points for almost any research on art and cultural policy from this period. These include the following: the Biblioteca Justino Fernández in the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of UNAM, which contains around fifteen thousand volumes of such rare journals as Savia Moderna or El Machete, plus a comprehensive collection of the book-length studies by all the main commentators on Mexican art from this country (along with such artifacts as all the black and white photographs made by Guillermo Kahlo of colonial architecture); the libraries of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (including almost all of the books, prints, an documents connected to the Academia de San Carlos); the Archivo del Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City (only two institutions in the U.S.A. have complete microfilm sets of this archive: the Library of Congress and the University of New Mexico); the Archivo General de la Nación in Lecumberri, Mexico City (which contains several million images within the audio visual resources department from La Revolución, including many of the Morelos insurgency); and the extensive holdings of the national photograph archive, the Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia at Pachuca.

Other archives with primary sources of note can be found in such unlikely places as the José Gómez Sicre Papers in Miami, Florida (which Alejandro Anreus used to telling effect in his exemplary recent book on José Clemente Orozco); or in such expected places in Mexico City as the Biblioteca Nacional, the Colegio de México, the Universidad Iberoamericana, the Bibloteca del Museo Franz Meyer, the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the Museo National de Arte. As for primary sources about individual artists, these are located in such sites in Mexico City as, the Museo Siqueiros in the Zona Polanco, the Museo Frida Kahlo Casa Azul in Coyoacán, the Museo Estudio San Angel, the Museo Mural Diego Rivera de Alemeda, the Museo Anahuacalli, or in such provincial capitals as the Museo Casa Diego Rivera in Guanajuato.

In the United States, there are several institutions with some key primary sources both published and unpublished about Mexican muralism: the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Library of Congress; the National Archives (specifically the General Records from 1940 through 1944 of the U.S. State Department); the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin; the Rockefeller Archival Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York; the Bertram Wolfe Papers in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (which contains such unpublished documents as Beaumont Newhall’s firsthand account of Diego Rivera’s fresco technique in the 1920s in Mexico City). For the two best overviews of repositories for primary sources in this regard, see: E. Barberena, “Un analisis de la información del arte latinoamericano contemporáneo” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., UNAM, 1987) and Orlando S. Suárez, Inventario del Muralismo Mexicano (UNAM, 1972).

Cuban Art and Culture (1959–1989)

Three collections of government documents concerning modern art and culture in Cuba can be singled out. First, there is the file of press dossiers on Cuban artists in the Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana. Secondly, there are two unsurpassed collections in the archives of the Ministerio de Cultura de la República de Cuba, Havana: Documentos normativas para las Casas de Cultura, Havana, Ministry of Culture, 1980 (dealing with the national system of Casas de Cultura); and Instrucciones metodológicas, objetivos, funciones y funcionamientos y requisitos fisco-ambientales de las galerías de arte, 2 vols., Havana, Ministry of Culture, 1988 (detailing the national network of gallery spaces).

The most important research libraries in Cuba for both unpublished and published documents (plus an outstanding collection of artworks by major figures like Wifredo Lam) are to be found at the invaluable Casa de las Américas in Havana, which is among the most significant cultural institutions in the Americas; and the large Biblioteca Nacional José Martí in Havana. In addition, there are other archives in Havana with notable primary documents for art history in the Academia San Alejandro, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and the Instituto Superior de Arte. As for key sources about such things as cultural policy in the provinces, see the archives at each of the Casas de Cultura around the country in various townships.

For a solid overview of institutions in the arts within Cuba, see the various subsections by Gerardo Mosquera and Roberto Segre in their entry for “Cuba” for the Dictionary of Art (London, 1996). See also a publication of the United Nations: Jaime Saruski and Gerardo Mosquera, La política cultural de Cuba (Paris, UNESCO, 1979). Also of fundamental importance are the following: O. López, Escuela San Alejandro: cronología (Havana, 1983); Jorge Rigol, Museo Nacional de Cuba (Leningrad, 1978); and Los museos de Cuba (Havana, Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1972).

Much the best guide to collections of primary documents from Cuba to be found within the United States is by the Dean of Cuban specialists in the United States, namely, Professor Louis A. Pérez, Jr., of the Latin American Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: A Guide to Cuban Collections in the United States (Westport, Conn., 1991). For a comprehensive catalog of Cuban newspapers, journals, unpublished manuscripts, and rare books located in the U.S., see: Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “Cuba Materials in the Bureau of Insular Affairs Library,” Latin American Research Review, vol. 13 (1978): pp. 182–88 and J. Fonseca, “Cuba Materials and Primary Source Collections: A Bibliography of Microfilm Negatives,” Cuban Studies, vol. 22 (1992): pp. 231–46. Overall, the most current and comprehensive bibliography of the literature on the Cuban Revolution, both primary and secondary, is to be found in the annual publication Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos, which is published by the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. For the predominant historiographical trends in Cuba during the first twenty-five years of the Revolution, see the Special Issue of the Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, vol. 27 (January–April 1985) and also Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Historiography in the Revolution: A Bibliography of Cuban Scholarship, 1959–1979 (New York, 1979).

Several institutions in the U.S. contain primary sources of considerable importance. They include the following: the Center for Cuban Studies in New York City, the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., and the Center for Southwest Studies along with the Slick Collection of Latin American Graphic Arts in Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. The latter institution houses, for example, the Margaret Randall Papers.

Nicaraguan Art and Culture (1919–1990)

The national institutions in Nicaragua for doing primary research on the Nicaraguan Revolution are few in number. On this, see: David Craven, “Art Libraries” in the entry for “Nicaragua” for the Dictionary of Art (London, 1996), p. 86. First there is the Biblioteca Nacional in Managua, with its Colección Rubén Darío, and then there are a few other libaries and archives of note. They include the following: the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua (directed by Lic. Margarita Vannini) at UCA, the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua; the Fondo de Promoción Cultural (directed by Lic. Luisa Amelia Castillo Ramírez) and the Pinacoteca (directed by Ana Ilce Gómez), both of which are in the Banco Nicaragüense de Industria y Comercio (BANIC); the small library in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Managua; and the archives of the Instituto de Cultura that in the 1990s replaced the Ministerio de Cultura of the 1980s, and which is housed in the old Palacio Nacional. (An important archive that I consulted in the 1980s, but which no longer exists, was the one located on the grounds of the old ASTC Headquarters and Gallery Space in Managua.)

Several private libraries and personal archives (along with art collections) are, however, among the only places at present to locate many of the most fundamental primary sources of the Sandinista years. These private collections include the archives of ArteFacto and those of the following people: Father Miguel D’Escoto, Father Ernesto Cardenal, Dr. Sergio Ramírez, Raúl Quintanilla, Jorge Arellano, and Roberto Parrales. Among the most important archives (including books and photographs, as well as more occasional primary sources) from the Sandinista years to be found in the U.S.A. are those in the personal papers of David Craven in Albuquerque, David Kunzle in Los Angeles, Margaret Randall (now in the Center for Southwest Studies at the University of New Mexico), John Ryder in Cortland, New York, and Carol Wells in Los Angeles. Two collections of post-Sandinista period interviews and primary documents are those of Lindsay Jones in Phoenix (which is centered on the artists of ArteFacto) and Neerja Vasishta in Washington D.C. (which concentrates on the fate of artists producing printura primitivista since 1990).

One of the most comprehensive bibliographic compilations of publications about the Nicaraguan Revolution up through the mid-1980s was published by a group of scholars at UCA: Libros sobre la Revolución (Managua: Escuela de Sociología de la Universidad Centroamericana, 1986). This book listed almost three hundred publications from thirty-nine different countries. A more limited but still noteworthy survey is found in Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, catálogo de publicaciones (Managua, 1989). Perhaps the single most significant collection of primary sources about the conception of cultural policy during the late 1970s and early 1980s is to be found in Daisy Zamora and Julio Valle-Castillo, eds., Hacia una política cultural de la Revolución (Managua: Ministerio de Culture, 1982).

Yet other crucial primary sources for this book were, of course, the scores of unpublished interviews that I conducted in Nicaragua in 1982, 1986, 1990, and 1995. Those of the 1980s were usually done with John Ryder. Some of these interviews are cited above in the endnotes. For a partial listing of these primary sources, see: David Craven, The New Concept of Art and Popular Culture in Nicaragua Since the Revolution in 1979 (Lewiston, New York, 1989), pp. 383–84 and the Appendices of this book.

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