In 2017, the NSU Art Museum undertook an ambitious project to survey and register its entire collection. This comprehensive effort involved unpacking, documenting, and conditioning the 7,500 objects in the collection. Recognizing the potential for photographically documenting the collection during this surveying process, I suggested the museum take advantage of this process to digitize the collection using high-resolution photography and an underutilized museum content management system. Working alongside the museum’s development department, we secured the necessary grants for this digitization project.

This project responds to the trend in Digital Humanities within museums that aims at creating new relationships and understanding between works of art and the public. In addition to creating a digital archive for the digital preservation of the collection, this digitization endeavor expanded the accessibility of the collection to a wider audience, enabling both art enthusiasts and scholars worldwide to explore, appreciate, and research this unique collection. This was particularly important for the NSU Art Museum, as it aimed to bridge the geographical distance between the collection and the scholars specializing in the particular art movements represented in the collection. The Online collection site facilitated greater national and international collaboration and additional study and analysis into the collection, ultimately enriching the understanding, interpretation, and relationships with the art.

As with many digital museum collections, this project and the site design was based on the categorization of the collection into sub-collections that were based on widely used art history classifications, such as “Contemporary,” “Modern”, “African Art”, and “Latin American Art.” The project Entre Las Aguas, raises questions about the division of art categories based upon an artist’s birthplace or the geographic execution of their art practice, with a particular focus on reevaluating the “Latinx and Latin American” categorization.