From the Vault is a series highlighting recent projects, research, and interesting finds from the Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA) department at Gleeson Library | Geschke Center. This post features the arrival of the Casa Hispana de Bellas Artes Collection.
SCUA aims to work with faculty, students, and staff to create unique learning opportunities and preserve the cultural memory of USF. We strive to put one of a kind and rare collections in the hands of students by arranging visits to the Donohue Rare Book Room and through our online digital collections.
SCUA is pleased to announce the addition of the Casa Hispana de Bellas Artes (Casa) archives to the collections. Casa was founded in 1966 in San Francisco’s Mission District by a group of pan-Latine artists to preserve and promote Latine/Hispanic culture through various forms of art including music, dance, poetry, theater, and visual arts. Casa provided programming through classes and workshops, events and exhibitions, a bi-lingual publishing collective known as Casa Editorial, as well as organized festivals like the first public celebration of Dia de los Muertos and the annual Raza Hispanidad Festival until 1983. Casa is also considered to be the seed organization of Galeria de la Raza, a gallery directed by Rene Yanez and Ralph Maradiaga that showcased Raza artists’ work.
Amilcar Lobos-Yong, a Guatemalan poet and one of Casa’s founding members, was a faculty member at the University of San Francisco (USF) in the early 1970s, where he significantly contributed to the development of USF’s Ethnic Studies program. Lobos also founded the Creative Art Project and Museum of Popular Art at USF in the mid 1970s. Pictured below is a flier and press release for a reading of Lobos’ narrative poem, Quetzal.
Unfortunately, the bulk of Casa’s official archival records were lost in the 1980s, so what remains and has been donated to Gleeson Library is mostly fliers, programs, publications, press releases, and articles from the personal collections of Casa founding members. The collection also consists of some photographs, A/V recordings, and textiles. We plan to fully process, digitize, and make available the Casa Hispana de Bellas Artes collection for research and teaching this fall. So far it has already been used for teaching in the Honors course, HONC 380: The Art of Protesting, which explores the relationship between art and social movements.
If you are a faculty or staff member and would like to learn more about our collections and how to use them in your courses, please contact our department at specialcollections@usfca.edu.
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