The new look of New York’s El Museo del Barrio, the city’s leading Latino cultural institution, is attracting art enthusiasts far beyond its East Harlem location. The museum reopened in October, following an 18-month renovation, with both structural improvements and an expansion of its public programming to include more free or low-cost concerts, lectures, films, and cultural celebrations. Further hoping to broaden its reach, El Museo has launched a website that showcases its 600-piece permanent art collection and partnered this year with museums in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina to host Arte Vida—the first exhibition surveying four decades of performing arts by Latinos in the United States.
The museum, founded in 1969 to provide greater cultural awareness for the Puerto Rican diaspora, is now on its way to fulfilling one of its original missions: to create an “open, flexible, virtual, and dynamic forum for people to come together,” in the words of Deborah Cullen, the director of curatorial programs.
