About
The Arquin Slide Project is a digital archive and database of Florida Atlantic University's collection of slides taken by Florence Arquin.
Florence Arquin
Florence Arquin (1900-1974) was an artist, educator, scholar, and documentary photographer. Educated at the University of Chicago, she became an assistant to the director in charge of art education in Illinois and was involved in the administration of WPA programs in the state. Arquin maintained an artistic practice during the 1930s and 1940s, exhibiting her work in both the United States, and notably, in 1943, in Mexico City. It was at this time that she met and befriended many of the leading figures of Modern Mexican Art, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Her photos of Kahlo are still among the most readily reproduced and can be found in the Google Arts & Culture platform in an exhibition by the Archives of American Art. She published a monograph on Rivera in 1971.
This unique combination of experiences eventually led Arquin to a position as the Kodachrome Slide Project Director, which was located in the American Council on Education and in cooperation with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA). Later, this position would be absorbed by the State Department. As head of the Kodachrome Slide Project, Arquin was charged with creating 33 slide sequences on Central and South America for distribution to educational institutions throughout the United States. In this way, the Federal Government aimed to educate Americans about our neighbors to the south and to bolster Pan-Americanism within the country. Between 1945 and 1951, Arquin traveled to Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and South Florida, taking slides, making presentations on behalf of the State Department at cultural institutions across Latin America, and promoting the slides in the United States. A record of these travels can be found in the Florence Arquin Papers at the American Archives of American Art (link).
These educational slide sequences were never as popular as the State Department hoped they might be. The rising specter of the Cold War shifted international focus from Pan-Americanism to fighting the Communist threat. Few, if any, institutions purchased Arquin’s slides. By 1963, the State Department deaccessioned the slides and returned them to Arquin. Dr. Kenneth Williams, the first president of Florida Atlantic University, purchased the slides from Arquin by 1964.
The Collection
But what had Dr. Williams paid for when he purchased the slides? Arquin sold him 25,000 slides, many of them from Latin America and the Caribbean. The subjects that interested Arquin and the State Department were diverse. Arquin documented the growing modern cities of Central and South America, the Colonial Architecture of the Americas, Native customs and cultures, as well as modern art in Mexico and elsewhere. Arquin even expanded her interest to Europe, focusing largely on Spain and Portugal. The result is a collection that is rich, varied, and documents the complex nature of life in Latin America in the middle of the 20th century.
In the early history of FAU, the collection was used for teaching and for educating the broader community. As a result, there have been losses. Of the original 25,000 slides Arquin initially sold to FAU, some 17,000 remain. A written catalog of Arquin’s slides was started at some point in FAU’s history. It was never completed, but has provided crucial metadata during our digital cataloging process. Most of the images are 35mm kodachrome slides and are generally in excellent condition. Another collection of Arquin’s slides can be found at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The Website
Emily Fenichel was hired by FAU in 2014. Soon after, she began to investigate the collection, Florence Arquin, and to explore the possibility of turning the slides into a digital humanities project. Camila Afanador-Llach joined the project soon after. The Arquin Slide Project was awarded an NEH Preservation and Access award in 2020 to support digitizing the slides, hiring student workers, and building the website. Digitization was completed by Backstage Library Works (link) in 2020.
Acknowledgements