THE LATINX ART CULTURE AND MEMORY ARCHIVE (TLACMA), 2024
The Latinx Art Culture and Memory Archive (TLACMA) is a container and public Latinx repository within Special Collections at Johns Hopkins University that holds shelf space for the discoverability, preservation, and study of Latinx Histories in the United States. It was made possible with the support of the Winston Tabb Special Collection Research Center.
The TLACMA collection was inaugurated with a set of 12 museum boxes containing 12 unique books, paper documents, and 11 audio interviews documenting the contributions of contemporary U.S. based Latinx artists, curators, and scholars with ties to Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC.
*Pop-Up exhibition was on view from Jan-April 10th 2024 at Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD.
*visit the TLACMA collection at JHU The Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center by appointment at 3400 N Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21218
TLACMA doubles as a call to action!
with the primary goal of disrupting archival silences TLACMA invites existing repositories to make shelf-space for missing histories within their own special collections to expand the scope of the stories they tell.
---The term Latinx is prioritized here for its queering sensibilities and to note that these holdings highlight the experiences, memory, and art of U.S. based individuals with Latin American origins — an important distinction to make in the face of a history of othering U.S. based Latinos as “perpetual foreigners” or “Latin Americans” and not simply American.---