The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin has announced Claudia Zapata as its first Associate Curator of Latin Art. Zapata is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a joint affiliation with the school’s Departments of Art History and Chicana/o and Central American Studies. They will take up their new position in July. Zapata previously worked on the groundbreaking traveling exhibition “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now,” curated by E. Carmen Ramos of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC and on display at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, through June 17.
The Blanton in February acquired 5,650 works from the Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia Collection, one of the largest gatherings of Chicano and Latino art in the world as part of its effort to become a major center for modern and contemporary Latino art. In their new role, Zapata is responsible for inventorying and researching the collection, and producing a related catalog. “It’s not a diversification of a financial portfolio where it’s a very distant market experience,” Zapata said. art news. “It’s very personal, and you can see that in the practice of collecting.”
Last month, the Blanton inaugurated two new gallery spaces dedicated to Latino art with an exhibition dedicated to portraits of Chicano artists. The creation of the Zapata curatorship, announced by the museum in February, is part of the larger Advancing Latinx Art in Museums initiative launched that month by the Ford, Getty, Mellon and Terra foundations. The consortium’s goal is to pool $5 million that will fund the creation of ten curatorial positions focused on Latinx art over a five-year period. The Blanton plan to staff Zapata’s position at the end of this period.
