The ambitious regionwide arts collaboration known as Pacific Standard Time, which three years ago focused on Southern California art from 1945 to 1980, will have for its sequel a broader but still relatively underexamined field: Latin American art.

On Tuesday, the Getty Foundation plans to announce its first round of grant recipients for the new project, Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A: 40 Southern California institutions receiving a total of $5 million to plan their own exhibitions on different aspects of Latin American art. The public will not see the resulting shows until 2017, but the project has already begun to boost scholarship in a field long considered on the cusp or up and coming.

“This shock to the system or jump-start, this huge infusion of capital, is really interesting — everybody is watching,” said Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, director of the Cisneros Foundation in New York, which is not a grant recipient but will be sending art to the Getty for conservation research and display as a related project. “Nobody has spread this amount of resources across multiple institutions before.”

Still, he wondered about the ultimate effect, considering that Los Angeles has not been the most prominent center for Latin American scholarship. Museums in other cities, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, are better known as pioneers in the field. “Will this just bring California up to speed in the field or will it create some new paradigms with new research and knowledge that will set a new standard?” Mr. Pérez-Barreiro asked.

Some of the Getty grant recipients will focus on individual artists, either Latino or Chicano, who have never received full retrospectives in the United States, like the Brazilian-born artist Valeska Soares at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Mexican-American Gilbert Luján, known as Magu, at the University of California, Irvine, art gallery.

Other museums are developing broader themed surveys, including Latin American modern design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, geometric art at the Museum of Contemporary Art and “radical” female artists at the Hammer Museum.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, who is organizing the show at the Hammer with Andrea Giunta of Argentina, said theirs would be the first survey to consider how women who are artists throughout Latin America confronted the social and political conditions of their own countries.

Ms. Fajardo-Hill added that she expected international collaboration to be one legacy of the initiative “because there just aren’t that many specialists in Los Angeles.”

For the first edition of Pacific Standard Time, which culminated in 2011, the Getty awarded $12 million in grants.

James Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, anticipates a similar grant budget for this project, but he also hopes to double the $5 million in joint marketing funds raised last time from outside sources.

“This time we’re trying to double that because it’s a bigger, more complex project,” he said. “Instead of looking at art produced in one area over four decades, we are now looking at art produced over diverse land masses over various centuries. To make the story deep but clear is going to be challenging.”

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