About the Project

The A Ver Revisioning Art History project stems from the conviction that individual artists and their coherent bodies of work are the foundation for a truly meaningful and diverse art history. Latina/o artists have challenged the art world, both influencing contemporary debates and validating new practices. They have provided the visual vocabulary for artistic innovation, cultural identity, social protest, and historical awareness. But despite their enormous contributions and successes, these artists remain largely absent from the historical record.

The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center has identified over 150 established Latina/o artists. Yet, few have been written about other than in brief exhibition reviews. “Today,” as we concluded in a recent policy brief, “this history is on the verge of being lost.”

In response to this pending crisis, the CSRC initiated A Ver: Revisioning Art History in 2002. Our first step was to study the issue, releasing two major reports in 2003, and to convene regular community forums with concerned artists, curators, scholars, and collectors. We then formed a national advisory board of leading scholars and curators that established guidelines for the series and made initial selections.

Today, the first fifteen books have been commissioned for publication by 2010 and will be distributed by the University of Minnesota Press. Our goal is for A Ver to reach a broad audience and provide a much-needed resource for art educators, exhibition curators, scholars, and students. Each book will be 9" x 7.5” with 100 color illustrations throughout, and it will include a 25,000 word essay, comprehensive bibliography, exhibition history, and index. Teaching guides and other resources for each book will be available from our website.

Artists for the monograph series are selected by the A Ver National Advisory Committee, which meets annually to determine subsequent publications. The committee reviews all nominations (and supporting materials) as well as develops the pool of qualified writers for the series.They strive to ensure a diverse and representative selection with respect to race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, geographic location, and artistic medium and style. The committee is also concerned with identifying and preserving the archival record for individual artists. While these factors are an important part of the deliberation process, they base their selections on a careful consideration of the individual artist and his or her body of work. In the end, there are many more exceptional and deserving artists than this project can address in any given moment. But it is our goal to make A Ver into an ongoing and largely self-sustaining project that will address a much larger number of artists over time.

This project is made possible in part through generous grants from the Ford Foundation, the Getty Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and UC MEXUS.