The Arquin Slide Collection Digitization Project aims to use the methodologies and technology of the Digital Humanities to provide access to one of the original teaching and research collections of Florida Atlantic University to researchers from many disciplines. A collaboration between art history professor Emily Fenichel, PhD., and graphic design professor Camila Afanador-Llach, MFA, the Florence Arquin Slide Project is an opportunity to advance research in the Digital Humanities at FAU and link design methodologies, computational practices, and humanities scholarship.
The project will digitize a collection of 20,000 slides taken by renowned photographer, scholar, and diplomat, Florence Arquin and currently housed in the Department of Visual Arts and Art History slide collection. The project will create descriptive metadata, archive the images and metadata, and make the collection accessible in a digital collection through a public website. Online access to the collection will serve as a powerful research tool for scholars throughout the world who study Latin America and the Caribbean. Our hope is that it will be used by scholars to investigate subjects as diverse as the United States’ Pan American movement, Modern Mexican painters, and the history of Central and South America.
Who was Florence Arquin?
Florence Arquin (1900-1974) was a noted documentary photographer, scholar, and artist. She wrote a book on Diego Rivera and was friends with Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Her images of Rivera and Kahlo at home are housed in the Smithsonian Museum’s Archive of American Art and the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico. These images are broadly disseminated, appearing in exhibitions, publications, and on social media. Arquin was also the Director of the Kodachrome Slide Project, which was part of the State Department. Her charge was to create several series of educational slides that could be used by schools and other institutions to teach the art and culture of Latin America and to promote the United States policy of Pan-Americanism. In all, Arquin took 25,000 slides to further these educational and political goals. Florida Atlantic University purchased Arquin’s slides in 1964, after the State Department deaccessioned them. FAU’s slides are the largest collection of Arquin’s photography in the world.
Arquin’s collection includes more than 250 slides documenting Diego Rivera’s work, including his portrait of Arquin herself. Arquin also took more than 600 images of Modern Mexican painters, such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and José Clemente Orozco. Her documentation of contemporary female Mexican artists is notable, as Arquin photographed the work and studios of Alice Rahon, Maria Izquierdo, and Olga Costa. Arquin was equally interested in the history and culture surrounding these artists. For example, Arquin includes 166 images of the geographic features of the Altiplano in Peru and Bolivia, 332 images of what she described as “Indian Life” in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, more than 250 images of Mexican agriculture, crafts, and markets. Nothing seemed to escape her notice, from Mexico’s Independence Day celebrations on September 16th, to the ancient dance known as the Volador, to pre-Columbian sculpture. Moreover, she recognized the intimate relationship South Florida has with Latin America and took more than 200 images of modern architecture in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. These numbers represent a mere sampling of the astonishing depth and breadth of this slide collection.