As a mark of the growing interest in art from Latin America in the United Kingdom, the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex has recently been awarded a grant from the UK¿s Art and Humanities Research Council to undertake research into the development of this field over the past forty years. During the one-year project researchers Dr. Isobel Whitelegg and Taína Caragol, under the direction of Professor Valerie Fraser, will consider exhibitions, publications, teaching and research produced in the UK focusing on art and artists from Latin America. They will be talking to UK-based artists from Latin America as well as to selected academics, critics, curators, and gallerists who specialise in art from the region. Important elements in this research will be the presence in London in the 1960s and 1970s of a number of influential artists from Latin America including Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel and David Lamelas. Pivotal events will include Dawn Ades' Art in Latin America: The Modern Era exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1989 and the foundation of University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA) in 1993. Publications such as the catalogue of Ades¿s exhibition mentioned above, and Valerie Fraser and Oriana Baddeley¿s Drawing the Line: Art and Identity in Contemporary Latin America (London, 1989) will need to be reviewed in the light of the specific UK context and the wider historiographical picture. This research aims to generate a new approach to the Anglophone history of modern and contemporary art from Latin America by asking if the historiographical traditions of the US and the UK can be usefully distinguished. Its goal is also to understand the continuities and differences between the modest beginnings of the Latin American art scene in avant-garde historical venues such as Signals and the contemporary and more generalized interest in the art of this region, manifested in the organisation of recent major exhibitions on Frida Kahlo, Hélio Oiticica, and the Tropicalia movement and the visibility of Latin American artists in UK galleries. Finally, the project aims to build links between interested parties in the UK through seminars and symposiasymposium. This project coincides with next year¿s opening of the new contemporary arts venue firstsite, in Colchester, where the programming will regularly include the exhibition of works from UECLAA, as well as residencies, performances, and other events related to the art of Latin America.