NYC & Company Welcomes El Museo Del Barrio Back To Manhattan

11/3/09

NYC & COMPANY WELCOMES EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO BACK TO MANHATTAN




Museum�s Expansion and Renovation Coincides with 40th Anniversary Celebration and Inaugural Exhibition



New York City (October 17, 2009) � NYC & Company, the City�s marketing, tourism and partnership organization, is pleased to join El Museo del Barrio in announcing its reopening in Manhattan�s Upper East Side. Located on Fifth Avenue, between 104th and 105th Streets, the renovated museum is the City�s leading Latino cultural institution. Coinciding with the debut of the museum�s completed renovation and expansion will be a 40th anniversary celebration, including a rich array of public programming, events, performances, and exhibitions. El Museo del Barrio will host an open house today (Oct. 17) to commemorate the opening.



�The reopening of El Museo del Barrio on Museum Mile is a welcoming milestone for New York City�s arts and cultural community. The new facilities will be an attractive draw for visitors who want to celebrate the diversity and abundance of the arts of the Caribbean and Latin America,� said George Fertitta, CEO of NYC & Company.



The renovated El Museo del Barrio will feature a new glass fa�ade, a new 4,500 square-foot redesigned courtyard, modernized galleries, a new caf�/programming space, and an expanded shop. Designed by Gruzen Samton Architect, the new galleries will create new space for temporal exhibitions, and will feature a new section dedicated to the museum�s permanent galleries.



With the opening of El Museo del Barrio comes an inaugural exhibition, Nexus: New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis, which explores the interactions between U.S.-born, Caribbean and Latin American artists working in New York City in the early twentieth century. Approximately 75 important works by artists from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay as well as artists working in the U.S., will be presented together for the first time, alongside contextual material�such as period photographs, original magazines and books, reproductions of poems, writing and other documentary materials. An illustrated, bilingual scholarly catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition, with essays that focus on specific environments, exchanges, or centers, and which detail the various artists� New York milieus and artistic development.



In addition to the inaugural exhibition, El Museo del Barrio will also unveil its new Carmen Ana Unanue Permanent Collection Galleries, dedicated to the museum�s permanent holdings of more than 6,500 artworks and objects. The exhibition in the galleries, Voces y Visiones: Four Decades through El Museo del Barrio�s Permanent Collection, presents one of the oldest and most important collections of twentieth-century Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American art in the U.S. El Museo is one of only a few Latino museums in the U.S. that has a permanent collection.



For more information about visiting El Museo del Barrio, go to elmuseo.org.



About NYC & Company:
NYC & Company is the official marketing, tourism and partnership organization for the City of New York, dedicated to maximizing travel and tourism opportunities throughout the five boroughs, building economic prosperity and spreading the positive image of New York City worldwide. For more information on visiting NYC, visit nycgo.com.



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