City of El Paso (El Paso Museum of Art)

The El Paso Museum of Art will enhance access to its collection of approximately 944 Latin American retablos – small devotional paintings dating from the 17th to 19th century. Museum staff will establish metadata criteria and a lexicon for the project and hire a part-time collections associate to enhance and standardize catalog records and photograph objects. The museum will collaborate with staff from regional repositories that have retablo collections, including the New Mexico State University Art Museum, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, and the University of Texas at El Paso. The project will culminate in a webpage that highlights the collection and ultimately serves as a clearinghouse for regional retablo research. Expanding public access to the collection and advancing knowledge of this art form will benefit scholars, students, visitors, and the local community.