CASE STUDY:

Hispanic Society Museum & Library

A Living Atlas of Peruvian Watercolors

The Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L) selected the CultureConnect platform to power its web-based digital experience From Lima to Canton and Beyond: The Peruvian Ethnographic (Costumbrista) Watercolors of Pancho Fierro and His School, 1820-1860. Part of a research project jointly funded by the United States National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, this online exhibition brings together dozens of ethnographic (costumbrista) watercolors by Pancho Fierro and Francisco Javier Cortés to ensure free and open access to the public and scholars across the world.

When the Hispanic Society approached the Axiell team, the call to action was clear: create a single public-facing place where viewers can explore the watercolors in depth, follow iconographic themes across institutions, and engage with new research as it develops. The institution also sought a DIY platform where museum staff could build, design, distribute, and evolve the content over time.

Unique to this online exhibition, the works and scholarship that comprise the project draw from multiple partner collections, including: the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (New York); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven); the Library of Congress (Washington, DC); the Museum of International Folk Art (Santa Fe, NM); the Lilly Library at Indiana University (Bloomington); the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles); the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art (Washington D.C.); the Brown Collection at the Royal Geographic Society (London); and the New York Public Library.

PRODUCTS

Advanced Interactive

SERVICES

Training

When the artwork is the evidence

Costumbrista watercolors document identity and power, public life and private labor, social hierarchy and civic ritual. Small details matter: a uniform, a tool, a hairstyle, a posture, a street corner.

HSM&L and its partners built the CultureConnect experience to keep those details front and center. The site invites visitors to slow down, look closely, and make connections across works that rarely appear side by side in physical space. This comparative approach lays essential groundwork for interpretation across collections and supports a shared vocabulary for understanding the genre’s iconography.

Research that is meant to be explored

Sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is funded through a multi-year grant that also resulted in an exhibition and a conference held at the Hispanic Society in 2025. The CultureConnect site fulfills the grant’s public engagement requirement while also serving as an ongoing home for cross-institutional scholarship.

Moving beyond traditional humanities-based research, HSM&L and collections partners worked with the Nottingham Trent University ISAAC Research Centre in the UK to conduct non-invasive, non-destructive imaging and spectroscopy using remote sensing systems. These investigative approaches resulted in insights into pigment use and how colorants were derived from the natural world. The findings are documented within the CultureConnect site so visitors can explore the watercolors through both cultural and scientific lenses.

Content Strategy is Key

Because the project serves both scholars and the public, the content strategy was designed to build confidence. The experience scaffolds knowledge so visitors can move from “What am I looking at?” to “What does this mean?” without needing a specialist background.

Key learning pathways include:

Historical context: 19th-century Peru

The opening section grounds the watercolor corpus within its historical moment. Visitors learn how to identify subjects using context clues, including fashion, setting, and objects, and begin to understand how these images communicate social roles and lived experience.

The history of costumbrismo

The site offers context for the genre itself. Costumbrista images depict local everyday life and customs in 19th-century Spain and Latin America. By presenting precedents and related context, the experience draws connections across movements, mediums, and historical change.

Artist overviews

Visitors get to know the artists represented, their early years, and their achievements, supported by examples of their work. This establishes authorship, intent, and artistic practice before visitors move into deeper interpretation.

Iconography across the corpus

A core section of the site lays a foundation for comparative looking. Visitors are prompted to recognize recurring groups of people, roles, places, activities, and events, then track how they appear across paintings and across collections.

A closer look: Pancho Fierro’s Holy Week Scroll

Later in the experience, a special section allows visitors to encounter Fierro’s masterpiece, a 15 ½ foot scroll depicting a Holy Week procession in Lima. Featuring in-depth analysis, this section links Fierro’s Holy Week Scroll to East Asian art and places the paintings alongside images of the same locations today. This helps bridge past and present while strengthening visual literacy.

Global connections: watercolor traditions beyond Peru

The experience also explores how increased travel and trade led to related watercolor traditions spreading to other regions, including Canton and the Philippines. Visitors are invited to compare works across collections and geographies.

Taken together, these pathways place the watercolors within a web of connections: between people and place, motif and meaning, material process and historical context. The result is a public experience where the scholarship feels discoverable, not locked behind academic walls.

Scientific insights: pigments and process

The site documents findings from imaging and spectroscopy research, focusing on painting technologies and pigment use. This layer adds a material history dimension that audiences can explore alongside iconographic interpretation.

The technology that makes this possible

This project required more than a standard webpage. It needed a platform that could hold depth without becoming hard to navigate, and that could support a living body of research.

CultureConnect made it possible to:

Present layered interpretation without overwhelming the visitor
Support cross-collection storytelling in a unified experience
Publish an experience that works across laptops, desktops, phones, and smart TVs
Provide accessibility features and screen reader compatibility
Share the site through the HSM&L website and social channels, expanding access beyond a single-entry point

The result is a digital engagement site that meets the public where they are, while still honoring the complexity of the material.

Dynamic research documentation

CultureConnect sites are designed to evolve. HSM&L and its partners have periodically updated the site to reflect ongoing pigment research using specialized equipment. That work produces substantial data to analyze and interpret, including through AI-assisted software.

This project demonstrates how a digital interactive can function as living documentation. It can grow as research questions shift, new findings emerge, and interpretation becomes richer over time.

Want to see more?

Explore the Peruvian Ethnographic Watercolors interactive through the Hispanic Society Museum & Library.

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